Warwick sits on a rocky ascent from every side, as the seventeenth-century antiquarian William Dugdale described it, with the River Avon curling around the southern foot of the town and the castle rising directly above the river in its south-east corner. The view across the Avon from the castle bridge is one of the great set-pieces of English heritage tourism: water, stone, and trees arranged with a composition that looks almost too good to be accidental. It mostly is accidental - the castle was built where it was for military reasons rather than aesthetic ones - but the result has been photographed, painted, and filmed often enough to feel like a stage set. William the Conqueror raised the original timber motte and bailey in 1068 while travelling north to deal with rebellion in Yorkshire; the great stone castle most visitors see is largely the work of the Beauchamp earls of the fourteenth century, expanded over the following five centuries until the Tussauds Group bought it in 1978 and turned it into a commercial visitor attraction, with Merlin Entertainments taking over the operation in later years.

On 5 September 1694 a fire broke out in central Warwick and within five hours had destroyed 460 buildings, leaving 250 families homeless. The medieval town centre was effectively erased - and what replaced it, over the following decades, gave Warwick the architectural character it has today. Most of the buildings in the centre date from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, raised in fine Stuart and Georgian stone by an England newly confident in its prosperity. The Court House on Jury Street, completed in 1731, still houses the town council. The Collegiate Church of St Mary was rebuilt in the years after the fire, though its medieval chancel and the extraordinary Beauchamp Chapel survived the flames. The chapel was built between 1443 and 1464 to house the tomb of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who had died in Rouen in 1439; his full-size copper-gilt effigy still lies on a tomb of Purbeck marble, the bronze cast in 1459 and considered one of the finest pieces of medieval English metalwork that survives.

On the High Street, against the old West Gate, stands one of the most extraordinary survivals of medieval Warwick: the Lord Leycester Hospital. The timber-framed buildings around its courtyard date from 1383, when they housed the medieval guilds of the town. In 1571 Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester - Elizabeth I's favourite and would-be suitor - turned the complex into a charitable home for retired and disabled soldiers. It is still that today. The Brethren, retired servicemen from the British Armed Forces, live in the same buildings under what is essentially the foundation Dudley laid down four and a half centuries ago. They still wear the dark-blue Elizabethan gowns Leicester prescribed, with his bear-and-ragged-staff badge on the breast. It is among the oldest continuously functioning charitable institutions in Britain.

J.R.R. Tolkien was married in Warwick - at the Catholic Church of Saint Mary Immaculate in 1916, a moment commemorated by a blue plaque on the church wall. Tolkien scholars have argued that Warwick gave him more than a wedding venue. Lynn Forest-Hill, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 2005, made a sustained case that the early Saxon burh and the Norman castle together inspired Edoras and Minas Tirith of The Lord of the Rings, and that the romance of Guy of Warwick - a Saxon hero credited with various dragon-slayings - left traces in Tolkien's plots. Christopher Tolkien, writing about his father's invented mythology, said that Kortirion, the chief city of Tol Eressea in the earliest drafts of the legendarium, would become in after days Warwick. Doctor Who came in 2007 to film The Shakespeare Code in the town's surviving Tudor streets, which had stood in for Elizabethan London. Pride and Prejudice and Moll Flanders filmed here. So did the BBC's Dangerfield. The town's combination of mostly post-1694 architecture with patches of surviving medieval timber has made it a reliable historical-drama location for half a century.

Modern Warwick is a market town and civil parish of about 36,000 people, the county town of Warwickshire and headquarters of Warwickshire County Council at Shire Hall in the town centre. It sits at junctions 13, 14, and 15 of the M40 motorway that connects Birmingham and London, on the Chiltern Main Line railway between the same two cities, and beside the Grand Union Canal where it passes through the town. The University of Warwick, despite its name, is actually located several miles north on the southern outskirts of Coventry. Bus services radiate out to Leamington Spa - effectively joined to Warwick by suburban development to form a conurbation of about 95,000 - to Stratford-upon-Avon and to Coventry. Warwick lost a Platinum Jubilee bid for city status in 2022. It remains, with some dignity, a market town.