The Tower's polar bear that fished in the Thames

Here is the Tower of London detail I love, and almost everyone misses it because they are too busy with the crown jewels and the ravens. Everyone knows the Tower as a fortress, a prison, a treasure house. Hardly anyone knows that for a stretch of the Middle Ages it was also a zoo, and that one of its residents was a polar bear who went fishing in the river.

In 1252 King Haakon IV of Norway sent Henry III a great white bear, almost certainly a polar bear, and Henry kept it in the royal menagerie he had founded inside the Tower walls. He was appalled at how much it cost to feed, so he passed the bill to the sheriffs of London, and then in 1253 he issued my favourite royal instruction of all time: make the bear a muzzle and a long rope so it can be taken to the Thames to swim and catch fish. So most days a Norwegian keeper led a polar bear down to the river, let out the rope, and let it dive for salmon in the middle of London while a crowd gathered to watch. The menagerie carried on for almost six hundred years, lions and an elephant and all, until the animals were finally rehoused in 1835.

I painted the Tower in watercolour and ink, those pale stone towers against the grey river, and the whole time I kept picturing a white bear out there among the boats, hauling up its dinner. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  The Tower of London, London · Travel Poster