More than a hundred people were publicly executed on Tower Hill over a span of four centuries, making this modest rise just outside the Tower of London one of the grimmest spots in the city.

Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell and George Boleyn all lost their heads here. The last was Lord Lovat in 1747, beheaded for siding with the Jacobites at Culloden. In 1381, Archbishop Simon Sudbury was dragged from the Tower during the Peasants' Revolt and decapitated on the hill. It took eight blows. His partly mummified head survives in a Suffolk church.

Today, the hill's oddest resident is a statue of the Roman Emperor Trajan, who never set foot in Britain. The head doesn't match the body, and the whole thing was rescued from a scrapyard in Southampton.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace Tower Hill's layers of history, from its Roman wall fragments and medieval scaffold site to the Peasants' Revolt and Tudor treason, connecting the hill to the wider story of London's defences, power struggles and public spectacle.