Gunpowder Plot

Meet the plotters

Guy Fawkes wasn’t the only conspirator in the 1605 plot. Others included his cousins Catesby and Wintour, Wintour’s brother Robert, their brother-in-law John Grant, Catesby’s second cousin Francis Tresham and more. No one in the group knew much about gunpowder, apart from Fawkes, an explosives expert from his military days and was chosen to set the fuse in the cellars underneath the Houses of Parliament.

Throughout the experience, meet characters based on the real-life conspirators as you take on the extreme steps for freedom. Experience tensions rising, feel the impact of life under religious persecution and interact with characters as you ask them for yourself why things are the way they are.

Your five senses will ignite as you make a dangerous attempt to escape the Tower, uncover a secret safehouse, and make the daring journey along the Thames towards the Houses of Parliament. You’re not just witnessing history, you are part of it.

Walk through history

Gunpowder Plot takes place in a purpose-designed venue in the Tower Vaults next to the Tower of London.

The vaults sit beneath the infamous Tower Hill site where much of the prelude to the Gunpowder Plot took place before Guy Fawkes’ torture and eventual death. The gunpowder was even stored there after the plot was foiled.

Fawkes was brought to the Tower of London to be imprisoned and interrogated. Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, led much of the interrogation in the Great Hall of the Queen’s House, a 16th-century timber-framed building that overlooks Tower Green.

At the time, the monarch or Privy Council had to authorise any form of torture. James I himself wrote the royal warrant: ‘If he will not other ways confesse, the gentler tortures are first to be used upon him, and then step by step you may employ the harsher, and so speede youre goode work.’