page_title: Jewel House
section_title: 1994–2011
hierarchical_section_title: Jewel House / History / 1994–2011
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Imperial State Crown - Seitenansicht von unten; Aufnahme aus der Ausstellung der britischen Kronjuwelen im Jewel House (Waterloo Baracks) des Tower of London English: Imperial State Crown (made in 1937 with alterations in 1953) - side view from bottom up with the front to the right; picture taken at the exhibition of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom inside the Jewel House (Waterloo Baracks, Tower of London)
context_page_description: The Jewel House is a vault housing the British Crown Jewels in the Waterloo Block at the Tower of London. It was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1994 and refurbished in 2012. Regalia have been kept in various parts of the Tower since the 14th century after a series of successful and attempted thefts at Westminster Abbey.
context_section_description: By the 1980s, up to 15,000 people a day were visiting the jewels, causing queues up to an hour long. The display had also begun to look old-fashioned; according to David Beeton, then CEO of Historic Royal Palaces, "they were displayed as if they were in a jeweller's shop window". In 1992, it was decided to bring the coronation regalia out of the underground vault and build a new Jewel House with larger capacity on the ground floor of the building at a cost of £10 million. Inspiration for the layout and presentation was taken from Disneyland, the Seville Expo and jewel houses across Europe.
  Queen Elizabeth II opened the new Jewel House on 24 March 1994. It occupies almost the entire ground floor of the Waterloo Block (formerly a barracks) and is designed to allow up to 20,000 people a day to see the collection of more than 100 priceless objects and 23,578 diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires. They were lit by state-of-the-art fibre optics and rested on French velvet.
  However, critics derided the experience as "just an exercise in crowd management, beautifully lit and presented but literally mechanistic", a reference to the six-inch-thick, two-tonne steel doors, and the use of a travelator at peak times.
caption: The Imperial State Crown
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