London's Execution Sites: The Tyburn Tree and Beyond

Capital Punishment in London

For centuries, capital punishment remained an intrinsic part of London life. Public executions functioned as major spectacles, drawing crowds numbering in the thousands to various dedicated locations across the capital.

The most notorious and historically significant execution sites in London are detailed below.

Primary Execution Sites

Tyburn (Marble Arch): Serving as London’s primary execution site for over 600 years, from 1196 to 1783, this spot is famous for the 'Tyburn Tree'. This massive, triangular wooden gallows could hang up to 24 prisoners simultaneously. Condemned individuals were paraded from Newgate Prison along Oxford Street to meet their end. Today, a stone plaque embedded in a traffic island near Marble Arch marks the location.

Newgate Prison (The Old Bailey): After Tyburn closed in 1783, executions moved directly outside Newgate Prison to reduce the chaos of the cross-city procession. Gallows were erected on the public street outside the debtors' door, drawing massive, rowdy crowds until public executions were banned in 1868. Hangings then moved inside the prison walls until Newgate was demolished in 1902, making way for the modern Old Bailey court.

Royalty, Treason, and High-Status Site

Tower Hill: Located just outside the walls of the Tower of London, this was the premier public execution site for high-profile traitors, nobles, and politicians between the 14th and 18th centuries. Famous figures such as Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell were beheaded here. The exact site of the scaffold is commemorated by a permanent memorial plaque inside Trinity Square Gardens.

Tower Green: Situated within the inner walls of the Tower of London, this private location was a privilege reserved for those of the highest rank whose public execution might otherwise incite a riot. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, only ten people met their fate here, including Queens Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey. In the 20th century, eleven spies faced execution by firing squad on these grounds.*

Banqueting House (Whitehall): The site of London's most famous single execution. On 30 January 1649, King Charles I was led out of a first-floor window onto a specially constructed scaffold directly outside the Banqueting House to be beheaded.

Old Palace Yard (Westminster): Positioned immediately outside the Palace of Westminster, this site hosted high-profile political executions. Guy Fawkes and his fellow Gunpowder Plotters were hanged, drawn, and quartered here in 1606, followed by the beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1618.

Specialised and Regional Sites

Execution Dock (Wapping): For more than 400 years, the High Court of the Admiralty used this specific Thames-side dock to execute pirates, mutineers, and smugglers. Pirates were hanged using a shortened rope to induce slow strangulation, known grimly as the "Marshal’s Dance". Their bodies remained suspended until three successive high tides washed over them. The site is located on the Wapping foreshore, near the historic Town of Ramsgate pub.

Smithfield: Best known as the site for medieval executions of religious heretics and political rebels, victims here frequently suffered death by burning at the stake or boiling. Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace was executed here in 1305. A memorial plaque remains visible on the exterior wall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

Kennington Common: Operating as the primary execution site for the county of Surrey, this common was heavily utilised for the punishment of highwaymen and Jacobite rebels. The former execution ground is now preserved as Kennington Park, with St Mark's church built close to the gallows site.

Following the executions, what happened to the bodies?

Even when executions weren’t taking place, Londoners faced constant, gruesome reminders of state power. The capital was an open-air theatre of warning, where stone architecture, rot, and iron combined to ensure no resident or traveller could escape the fatal consequences of crime.

Prisons and Chains: Hulking stone fortresses like Newgate Prison and Horsemonger Lane Jail housed condemned prisoners awaiting the gallows. Even for those eventually spared, the buildings themselves broadcasted a grim message: chains and heavy leg-irons dangled conspicuously above the entrances, a stark visual warning to every passerby of the misery waiting inside.

Gates and Bridges: Closer to the city centre, the severed remains of the condemned served as long-term landmarks. The heads, limbs, and quartered body parts of executed rebels were distributed across London, nailed to city gates, or left on display for months, years, or even decades. At London Bridge and Temple Bar, traitors' heads spiked atop poles stared down at the daily crowds below.

Roads and Waterways: Beyond the city walls, the warnings turned to rot. Gibbets line the main highways leading into the capital, while cages containing the decaying corpses of criminals swung along the shores of the River Thames. Whether entering London by land or by boat, travellers were greeted by the silent, swaying spectres of the law.

*Here is a list of all twenty-one confirmed executions at the Tower of London.

1. 1483, June 13: William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings (beheaded)
2. 1536, May 19: Anne Boleyn (beheaded)
3. 1541, May 28: Margaret Plantagenet Pole, Countess of Salisbury (beheaded)
4. 1542, February 13: Catherine Howard (beheaded)
5. 1542, February 13: Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford (beheaded)
6. 1554, February 12: Lady Jane Grey (beheaded)
7. 1601, February 25: Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (beheaded)
8. 1743, July 18: Corporal Samuel Macpherson, Black Watch Regiment (shot for desertion)
9. 1743, July 18: Corporal Malcolm Macpherson, Black Watch Regiment (shot for desertion)
10. 1743, July 18: Private Farquhar Shaw, Black Watch Regiment (shot for desertion)
11. 1914, June 11: Carl Hans Lody (shot for spying)
12. 1915, June 23: Karl Friedrich Muller (shot for spying)
13. 1915, July 30: Haike Marinus Petrus Jansson (shot for spying)
14. 1915, July 30: Wilhelm Johannes Roos (shot for spying)
15. 1915, September 10: Ernst Waldemar Melin (shot for spying)
16. 1915, October 19: Fernando Buschman (shot for spying)
17. 1915, October 26: George Traugott Breeckow (shot for spying)
18. 1915, October 27: Irvin Guy Ries (shot for spying)
19. 1915, December 2: Albert Meyer (shot for spying)
20. 1916, April 11: Ludovico Zendery Hurwitz (shot for spying)
21. 1941, August 15: Joseph Jakobs (shot for espionage)