First Tower

The story

Officially St Aubin's Bay No. 1, this round granite tower beside Victoria Avenue is one of the Conway towers built in the 1780s, after Governor Henry Seymour Conway's plan for thirty coastal towers was approved in 1778. Round and tapered, with two upper floors ringed by musketry loopholes and four machicolations on the parapet, it already appears on the Richmond map of 1795. The whole district took its name from it. The States bought the tower from the Crown in 1896; two years later a water pump and tank fixed to the parapet cracked the stonework, and a short-lived windmill on top was soon taken down. Today it has the least glamorous job of any Jersey tower: it ventilates the sewage pumping station beneath it. Its sister tower at Bel Royal was demolished by the Germans in January 1943; Beaumont Tower, the third in the bay, still stands.