King Charles III and Queen Camilla laid white roses and a handwritten note at the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday, in one of the most solemn moments of their four-day state visit to the United States. "We honour the memory of those who so tragically lost their lives on 11th September 2001," the note read. "We stand in enduring solidarity with the American people in the face of their profound loss." The visit marks the first time the royal couple have been to the site, and the first visit by a reigning British monarch since the attacks — which killed nearly 3,000 people, including 67 British nationals — a quarter-century ago.
The couple were accompanied by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who chairs the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, as well as current Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Around 90 guests gathered at the memorial's two reflecting pools, which stand where the Twin Towers once rose above Lower Manhattan. Victims' family members held up photos of their lost loved ones; some embraced the Queen. Charles placed the arrangement on a parapet bearing victims' names and the couple bowed their heads in silence before meeting with first responders and representatives of charities supporting affected families. Security was intense, with police snipers on rooftops, heavy trucks blocking intersections and helicopters overhead — standard precautions New York extends to visiting heads of state.
The memorial stop carried clear diplomatic weight. Charles had addressed a joint session of Congress on Tuesday — the first British monarch to do so since his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in 1991 — where he invoked the 9/11 attacks to make the case for sustained NATO cohesion, including continued support for Ukraine. "This atrocity was a defining moment for America and your pain and shock were felt around the whole world," he told lawmakers. The visit comes at a moment of friction between London and Washington: President Donald Trump has criticised Britain's limited engagement in the ongoing US-led conflict against Iran, and has threatened to revisit a trade agreement with the UK. In a pointed aside, Trump suggested Charles would have supported his approach to Iran "if it were up to him" — a claim Buckingham Palace declined to comment on publicly.
Mayor Mamdani — born in Uganda to parents of Indian origin, and a prominent left-wing voice within the Democratic Party — greeted the King warmly at the memorial, though their exchange lasted only seconds. Earlier, at a press conference, he had said he would encourage Charles to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond, one of the world's largest cut diamonds, seized from the Indian subcontinent in 1849 and now part of the British Crown Jewels. The remark underscored an undercurrent of post-colonial tension that shadowed an otherwise ceremonial occasion.
Elsewhere in New York, the day balanced gravity with colour. Charles visited Harlem Grown, an urban farming initiative in Harlem that works with children facing food insecurity, where he planted lavender and mustard seeds and fed chickens. Queen Camilla attended a literacy event at the New York Public Library alongside actress Sarah Jessica Parker, reading aloud from Winnie-the-Pooh — whose original 1920s stuffed toys are on permanent display at the library — and donating a replacement Roo doll, the only figure missing from the collection since the 1930s. The evening concluded with a star-studded reception for the King's Trust, the youth charity Charles founded in 1976, attended by Lionel Richie, Donatella Versace and Stella McCartney at Christie's auction house, as New York's Empire State Building was lit in red, white, blue and gold in the royal couple's honour.