When I was in junior high school and high school my family visited London a couple of times. I can remember going to the Tower of London. It didn't create a good impression on me. I kept a trip journal at the time on the first visit to London when I was 13 years old. I wrote: "We get out of the bus in front of the Tower of London, really many towers, serving the Queen as one of her many palaces, and as her chief fortress. It looks dark and forbidding, gloomy and ruthlessly sober. The Tower appears like a sudden stark vision, an apparition of death. Into its ancient walls we enter, into this House of Usher."
I was of course being overly dramatic. I talk about hurrying back to the bus at the end of the tour and promising never to come back.
I guess I thought it was just too Gothic.