Horse Guards Parade: Trooping the Colour

Why is it significant?

You are standing at the edge of a vast square of pale gravel, big enough to drill a whole regiment, and across it rises a long stone building with a little clock tower and an arch through to Whitehall.

Key Facts

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You are standing at the edge of a vast square of pale gravel, big enough to drill a whole regiment, and across it rises a long stone building with a little clock tower and an arch through to Whitehall. This is Horse Guards Parade, and on most days it is surprisingly empty... a royal stage waiting for its play.

Five hundred years ago this was the tiltyard of Whitehall Palace, where Henry VIII watched knights in armour charge each other with lances. The palace itself burned down in 1698, and the elegant building you see replaced an older guardhouse in the 1750s, designed by William Kent and finished after his death. It was, for a long time, the headquarters of the British Army.

Every June the square fills for Trooping the Colour, the parade for the monarch's official birthday. More than a thousand soldiers in scarlet and bearskins, hundreds of horses, massed bands... and in the middle a single regimental flag, the colour, carried slowly along the ranks, a ritual born on battlefields where soldiers had to recognise their flag in the smoke. Queen Elizabeth the Second took the salute on horseback for many years, and for eighteen of them she rode side-saddle on a black mare called Burmese. In 2023 King Charles the Third rode at the parade too, the first monarch to do so on horseback since 1986.

Look up at the clock on the tower. Legend says a small black mark on the clock face beside the figure two records the hour of a death: King Charles the First was beheaded across the road, outside the Banqueting House, on the 30th of January 1649. Historians shrug... but the guards like the story.

The mounted sentries in their boxes belong to the Household Cavalry, the Life Guards in red and the Blues and Royals in blue, and their museum inside the building lets you watch the horses in their stables through a glass wall. In 2012 this solemn square even hosted Olympic beach volleyball. Now cross Horse Guards Road into St James's Park and follow the lake to the bridge in the middle.