When the council first announced that they were doing tours of it, so you could go up to the top, they had to sell tickets by lottery, such was the demand. However, on Saturday, my younger daughter noticed a sign outside the tower saying that tours were available. I checked online and indeed they were: I bought us two tickets for Sunday at 2:30pm (my wife didn't want to go because at's 147 steps to the top, including a very rickety set to the cupola).
If my daughter hadn't seen the sign, we wouldn't have known that tours were still available. There's been hardly any publicity. This perhaps explains why only six people were on the tour when the maximum allowed was twenty-three.
The climb wasn't all that bad, and apart from vertical cracks in the brickwork, a lot of lead paint and some arsenic in the grouting of the water tank, it was fairly safe. The views from the top are spectacular.
This is the one down Colchester High Street:
The university towers are on the horizon in the top-right corner. If I'd have brought my binoculars, I could apparently have seen the cranes at Felixtowe docks, twenty miles away.
If you don't mind a climb up a spiral staircase (here are some landings, so you can catch your breath) and aren't put off by a potted history of Victorian architecture and local politics, it's well worth it just for the views. This may be the last chance you get before the North Essex Heritage begins an £8m refurbishment courtesy of a National Lottery grant.
Of course, once they've finished the refurbishment you'll be able to go up in a lift and look out of broad windows at the tank level, so avoiding the rickety staircase, so you might want to hold off instead.
The cupola at the top of the tower is called the "smoking room". Nobody knows why.