Broadway Tower

Broadway Tower stands on Broadway Hill, the second-highest point of the Cotswolds, near the village of Broadway in Worcestershire. The 18th-century limestone building is hexagonal with three corner turrets, battlements and gargoyles. It is four storeys high and 65 feet tall, though the hill itself rises to 1,024 feet above sea level. The tower was designed by James Wyatt for the 6th Earl of Coventry and completed in 1799. It once housed a private printing press owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps, who called it the ‘Lighthouse of Wisdom’. Queen Victoria’s coronation bonfire burned here in 1837 as part of 2,548 nationwide beacons. Artists William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti stayed at the tower in the 1870s. Visitors climb two spiral staircases in separate turrets to reach the rooftop viewing platform. The top three floors form a small museum, and the tower sits within Broadway Tower Country Park. Nearby is a memorial to the crew of a Whitley bomber that crashed in 1943, and a restored Cold War monitoring post from the 1950s.