Most visitors are amazed at how green and pleasant so much of the city centre is, with three royal parks – St James’s Park, Green Park and Hyde Park – forming a continuous grassy belt that stretches for nearly three miles. Hyde Park, together with its westerly extension, Kensington Gardens, is the largest of the trio, covering a distance of a mile and a half from Speakers’ Corner in the northeast to Kensington Palace in the southwest. You can jog, swim, fish, sunbathe or mess about in boats on the Serpentine, cross the park on horseback or mountain bike, or view the latest in modern art at the Serpentine Gallery. At the end of your journey, you’ve made it to one of London’s most exclusive districts, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
ROYAL GUN SALUTES
At noon in Hyde Park on February 6 (Accession Day), April 21 (Queen’s Birthday) and November 14 (Prince of Wales’s Birthday), the Royal Horse Artillery wheel out cannons and the park resounds to a 41-round Royal Gun Salute. If a date falls on a Sunday, then the salute takes place the next day. Further gun salutes take place in Green Park, on 2 June (Coronation Day), 10 June (Duke of Edinburgh’s Birthday), at 11.08am for the State Opening of Parliament (in early May) and at 11am on the Queen’s official birthday (a variable date in June), as well as for official State visits.
Hyde Park
Daily 5am–midnight • 
0300 061 2000, 
royalparks.gov.uk • _test777
Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch, Knightsbridge or
Lancaster Gate
Seized from the Church by Henry VIII to satisfy his desire for yet more hunting grounds, Hyde Park was first opened to the public by James I, when refreshments available included “milk from a red cow”. Under Charles II, the park became a fashionable gathering place for the beau monde, who rode round the circular drive known as the Ring, pausing to gossip and admire each other’s equipages. Its present appearance is mostly due to Queen Caroline, an enthusiast for landscape gardens, who spent a great deal of George II’s money creating the park’s main feature, the Serpentine lake.
Hangings, muggings and duels, the 1851 Great Exhibition and numerous public events have all taken place here – and it’s still a popular gathering point for pop concerts in the summer, Christmas markets in the winter and political demonstrations all year round. For the most part, however, Hyde Park is simply a wonderful open space that allows you to lose all sight of the city beyond a few persistent tower blocks. The southeast corner of the park contains two conventional tourist attractions: Apsley House, housing a museum to the Duke of Wellington, and the triumphal Wellington Arch, which you can now climb.
HYDE PARK STATUES AND MEMORIALS
Hyde Park is peppered with statues, none more colossal than the 18ft-high bronze of Achilles, in the southeastern corner of the park, designed in 1822 by Richard Westmacott to commemorate the Duke of Wellington, and cast from captured French cannon. As the country’s first public nude statue it caused outrage, especially since many thought it a portrait of the duke himself, and the chief fundraisers were “the women of Great Britain”. In actual fact, it represents neither the duke nor Achilles, but is a copy of one of the Horse Tamers from the Quirinal Hill in Rome. William Wilberforce led a campaign to have the statue removed for decency’s sake; a fig leaf was placed in the appropriate place as a compromise.
Visible to the north is the July 7 Memorial, a simple, startling memorial to the 2005 London suicide bombings. The 52 stainless steel pillars stand nearly 12ft high, and each one is inscribed with the victim’s time and place of death. Only a short distance to the west, in The Dell, a couple of boulders set in gravel within a copse of silver birch, form an even more understated Holocaust Memorial.
To the north of the nearby Serpentine stands the park’s over-manicured bird sanctuary, overlooked by the Hudson Memorial, sculpted by Jacob Epstein and featuring a low relief of Rima, a naked, female, South American version of Tarzan, and several exotic birds. (Rima the Jungle Girl is the main protagonist in the 1904 adventure novel Green Mansions, written by the naturalist and writer W.H. Hudson.) It’s difficult to believe now, but when the memorial was unveiled in 1925, there was a campaign of protest against the statue, led by the Daily Mail. Rima was considered too butch, the art too “Bolshevist” and the memorial later became the victim of several (anti-semitic) attacks.
Marble Arch
Marble Arch looks rather forlorn on a ferociously busy traffic island in the treeless northeastern corner of the park at the west end of Oxford Street. Designed in 1828 by John Nash as a triumphal entrance for Buckingham Palace, it has suffered over the years: the sculpted friezes intended to adorn it ended up on the palace, while the equestrian statue of George IV, intended to surmount it, was carted off to Trafalgar Square. When the palace was extended in the 1840s, the arch was moved to form an entrance to Hyde Park, its upper chambers used as a police observation post. During the 1855 riot (see Speakers’ Corner), a detachment of police emerged from the arch, like the Greeks from the Trojan Horse, much to the surprise of the demonstrators. The arch has been joined recently by a slightly surreal 33ft-high bronze sculpture of a horse’s head by Nic Fiddian-Green.
Tyburn Convent
8 Hyde Park Place • Daily 6.30am–8.30pm • Guided tours 10.30am, 3.30 &
5.30pm • Free • tyburnconvent.org.uk • _test777 Marble Arch
Despite appearance, Marble Arch stands on the most historically charged spot in Hyde Park, as it marks the site of Tyburn gallows, the city’s main public execution spot from at least 1196 until 1783 (when the action moved to Newgate). There’s a plaque on the traffic island in the middle of Edgware Road where it joins Bayswater Road marking the approximate site of the gallows, where around fifty thousand lost their lives. Of these, some 105 were Catholics, martyred during the Reformation, in whose memory the Tyburn Convent was established in 1902. It’s run by a group of cloistered French Benedictine nuns who are happy to show visitors round the basement shrine, which contains a mock-up of the Tyburn gibbet over the main altar, and various pictures and relics of the martyrs. The house next door to (and now part of) the convent, no. 10, is reputedly London’s smallest, measuring just three and a half feet across.
TYBURN GALLOWS
For nearly five hundred years, Tyburn was the capital’s main public execution site, its three-legged gibbet known as the “Tyburn Tree” or the “Triple Tree”, capable of dispatching over twenty people at one go. Dressed in their best clothes, the condemned were first processed through the streets in a cart (the nobility were allowed to travel in their own carriages) from Newgate Prison, often with the noose already in place. They received a nosegay at St Sepulchre, opposite the prison, and then a pint of ale at various taverns along the route, so that most were blind drunk by the time they arrived at Tyburn. The driver had to remain sober, however, hence the expression “on the wagon”.
The condemned were allowed to make a speech to the crowd and were attended by a chaplain, though according to one eighteenth-century spectator he was “more the subject of ridicule than of serious attention”. The same witness describes how the executioner, who drove the cart, then tied the rope to the tree: “This done he gives the horse a lash with his whip, away goes the cart and there swings my gentleman kicking in the air. The Hangman does not give himself the trouble to put them out of their pain but some of their friends or relations do it for them. They pull the dying person by the legs and beat his breast to dispatch him as soon as possible.”
Not all relatives were so fatalistic, however, and some would attempt to support the condemned in the hope of a last-minute reprieve, or of reviving the victim when they were cut down. Fights frequently broke out when the body was cut down, between the relatives, the spectators (who believed the corpse had miraculous medicinal qualities), and the surgeons (who were allowed ten corpses a year for dissection). The executioner, known as “Jack Ketch” after the famous London hangman, was allowed to take home the victim’s clothes, and made further profit by selling the hanging rope by the inch. Following the 1780 Gordon Riots, the powers-that-be took fright at unruly gatherings like Tyburn, and in 1783 the Tyburn Tree was demolished.
Speakers’ Corner
• speakerscorner.net • _test777 Marble Arch
In 1855 an estimated 250,000 people gathered in the northeastern corner of the park to protest against the Sunday Trading Bill (Karl Marx was among the crowd and thought it was the beginning of the English Revolution), and ever since it has been one of London’s most popular spots for political demos. In 1872 the government licensed free assembly at Speakers’ Corner, a peculiarly English Sunday-morning tradition that continues to this day, featuring a motley assortment of ranters and hecklers. Despite the park authorities’ best attempts, the largest demonstration in London’s history took place in this section of the park in 2003 when over a million people turned up to try and stop the war against Iraq.
Hyde Park corner
The park’s southeast corner, Hyde Park Corner is a better place to enter the park than Marble Arch. You’ll still have to battle with the traffic, but at least you can visit Wellington Arch, which stands at the centre of London’s first roundabout. A statue of Wellington no longer graces the arch, but instead stands at ground level opposite his erstwhile residence, Apsley House. Wellington is depicted seated astride his faithful steed, Copenhagen, who carried the field marshal for sixteen hours during the Battle of Waterloo; the horse eventually died in 1836 and was buried with full military honours at the duke’s country pile in Hampshire.
Close by are two powerful war memorials unveiled in 1925: the first, the Machine Gun Corps Memorial, features the naked figure of David leaning on Goliath’s sword and the chilling inscription, “Saul hath slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands”; the larger of the two, the Artillery Memorial, includes a 9.2-inch howitzer rendered in Portland stone, realistic relief depictions of the brutality of war and the equally blunt, Shakespearean epitaph, “Here was a royal fellowship of death”.
These two have since been joined by two much larger, very striking memorials: the Australian War Memorial is a gargantuan curved wall of grey granite slabs inscribed with the names of the towns in which the soldiers were born and the battles they fought; opposite stand the sixteen bronze spikes of the New Zealand Memorial, each of which is inscribed with text, patterns and sculptures commemorating the bonds between New Zealand and the UK.
Much more conventional in approach (and controversial in subject matter) is the gargantuan RAF Bomber Command Memorial, unveiled in 2012, just inside Green Park, on the eastern edge of Hyde Park Corner, as it joins Piccadilly. The tone is decidedly triumphant, with a Neoclassical portico sheltering a larger-than-life air crew amid defiant quotes from Churchill (and Pericles).
Wellington Arch
Hyde Park Corner • Wed–Sun: April–Oct 10am–5pm; Nov–March
10am–4pm • EH • £4 • _test777 Hyde Park Corner
Designed by a youthful Decimus Burton in 1828 to commemorate Wellington’s victories in the Napoleonic Wars, Wellington Arch originally served as the northern entrance to Buckingham Palace. Positioned opposite Burton’s delicate Hyde Park Screen, the arch once formed part of a fine architectural ensemble with Apsley House, Wellington’s London residence, and the former St George’s Hospital, now The Lanesborough Hotel. Unfortunately the symmetry was destroyed when the arch was repositioned in 1883 to line up with Constitution Hill – named after the “constitutional” walks that Charles II used to take here. The arch’s original statue was an enormous equestrian portrayal of the “Iron Duke” erected in 1846 while he was still alive. The duke was taken down in 1883, and eventually replaced by Peace and her four-horse chariot, erected in 1912. Inside, you can view a permanent exhibition on the history of the arch, and special exhibitions on England’s heritage, and take a lift to the top of the monument (once London’s smallest postwar police station) where the exterior balconies offer a bird’s-eye view of the swirling traffic of London’s first-ever roundabout established in 1962.
THE IRON DUKE
Perhaps if the Duke of Wellington had died, like Nelson, at his moment of greatest triumph, he too would enjoy an unsullied posthumous reputation. Instead, the famously blunt duke went on to become the epitome of the outmoded, reactionary conservative, earning his famous nickname, the “Iron Duke”, not from his fearless military campaigning, but from the iron shutters he had to install at Apsley House after his windows were broken by demonstrators rioting in favour of the 1832 Reform Act, to which the duke was vehemently opposed.
Born Arthur Wesley in Dublin in 1769 – the same year as Napoleon – he never considered himself Irish: “just because you’re born in a stable, doesn’t make you a horse” he is alleged to have said. He was educated at (but hated) Eton and the French military academy at Angers, and campaigned out in India, helping to defeat Tipu Sultan, and becoming Governor of Mysore. After continued military success in his Napoleonic campaigns, he eventually became Duke of Wellington in 1814, shortly before achieving his most famous victory of all at Waterloo.
With great reluctance he became prime minister in 1828, “a station, to the duties of which I am unaccustomed, in which I was not wished, and for which I was not qualified…I should have been mad if I had thought of such a thing”. Despite his own misgivings, his government passed the Catholic Relief Act – allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament – thus avoiding civil war in Ireland, but splitting the Tory ranks. Accused of popery by the Earl of Winchelsea, Wellington challenged him to a duel in Battersea Park; the duke fired and missed (he was a notoriously bad shot), while the earl shot into the air and apologized for the slur.
Wellington’s opposition to the 1832 Reform Act brought down his government and allowed the Whigs (under Earl Grey, of tea fame) to form a majority government for the first time in sixty years. Despite retiring from public life in 1846, he was on hand to organize the defence of the capital against the Chartists in 1848, and strolled across to the Great Exhibition every day in 1851. Two million people lined the streets for his funeral in 1852 (more than for anyone before or since), and he has more outdoor statues (and pubs named after him) in London than any other historical figure. Despite this, his greatest legacy is, of course, the Wellington boot, originally made of leather, now rubber.
Apsley House
149 Piccadilly • Wed–Sun: April–Oct 11am–5pm; Nov–March
11am–4pm • EH • £6.70 • _test777 Hyde Park Corner
Known during the Iron Duke’s lifetime as “Number One, London”, Apsley House was once an immensely desirable residence, but nowadays, overlooking a very busy roundabout, it would be poor reward for any national hero. The interior isn’t what it used to be either, but in this case it’s Wellington who’s to blame. Built and exquisitely decorated by Robert Adam in the 1770s for Baron Apsley, it was remodelled by Benjamin Wyatt after Wellington bought the place in 1817. Wyatt faced the red-brick exterior with Bath stone and more or less got rid of the Adam interiors. As a result, the house is very much as it would have been in Wellington’s day, and the current duke still lives in the attic.
The art collection
The house is worth visiting for the art collection alone. Wellington acquired the paintings in 1813 after the Battle of Vittoria, when he seized the baggage train of Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, who was fleeing for France with two hundred paintings belonging to the King of Spain. The best pieces, including works by de Hooch, Van Dyck, Goya, Rubens and Murillo, cover the red walls of the Waterloo Gallery on the first floor, where sliding mirrors cover the windows. The most prized works of all are a trio by Velázquez – The Water-Seller of Seville, Portrait of a Gentleman and Two Young Men Eating at a Humble Table – though Wellington preferred Correggio’s Agony in the Garden, the key for which he used to carry round with him, so he could take the picture out of its frame and dust it fondly.
The rooms
Like several of the house’s other rooms, the Waterloo Gallery was originally hung with yellow satin, which, as one of the duke’s friends lamented, “is just the very worst colour he can have for the pictures and will kill the effect of the gilding”. It was here that Wellington held his annual veterans’ Waterloo Banquet, using the thousand-piece silver-gilt Portuguese service, now displayed in the rather lugubrious Dining Room at the other end of the house. Most of the Waterloo portraits are, in fact, hung in the adjacent Striped Drawing Room, which is decorated like a military tent in the manner of Napoleon’s Loire chateau, Malmaison.
Canova’s famous, more than twice life-sized, nude statue of Napoleon stands at the foot of the main staircase, having been bought by the government for the duke in 1816. It was disliked by the sitter, not least for the tiny figure of Victory in the emperor’s hand, which appears to be trying to fly away. In the dimly lit Plate and China Room, also on the ground floor, you can view numerous gifts to the duke, including a four hundred-piece Prussian dinner service decorated with scenes of Wellington’s life, and the bizarre Egyptian service, which was originally a divorce present from Napoleon to Josephine; unsurprisingly, she rejected it and Louis XVIII ended up giving it to the duke. In the basement there’s plenty of Wellingtonia, a goodly selection of cruel, contemporary caricatures and a pair of the famous boots.
Rotten Row
From behind the Hyde Park Screen, which stands beside Apsley House, two roads set off west to Kensington: South Carriage Road, which is open to cars, and Rotten Row, which remains a bridle path. The name is thought to be a corruption of route du roi (king’s way), after William III who established it as a bridle path linking Westminster and Kensington. William had three hundred oil lamps hung from the trees to try to combat the increasing number of highwaymen active in the park, thus making Rotten Row the first road in the country to be lit at night. The measure was only partly successful – George II himself was later mugged here. To the south of Rotten Row, the Hyde Park Barracks are difficult to miss, thanks to Basil Spence’s uncompromising 308ft-tall concrete residential tower block. Early in the morning, you might catch sight of the Household Cavalry exercising in the park, and at around 10.30am daily (Sun 9.30am) they set off for the Horse Guards building in Whitehall for Changing the Guard.
The Serpentine
Rowing boats and pedalos Easter–Oct • Solarshuttle June–Aug daily every 30min noon–dusk • One way £2.50
The Serpentine, Hyde Park’s curvaceous lake, was created in 1730 by damming the Westbourne, a small tributary of the Thames, so that Queen Caroline might have a spot for the royal yachts to mess about on. A miniature re-enactment of the Battle of Trafalgar was staged here in 1814, and two years later Shelley’s pregnant wife, Harriet Westbrook, drowned herself after the poet had eloped with the 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The popular Lido is on the south bank, alongside its lovely café, and rowing boats and pedalos can be rented from the Boathouse on the north bank. The solar-powered Solarshuttle boat ferries folk from one bank to the other in summer.
THE GREAT EXHIBITION AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE
South of the Serpentine was the site of the Great Exhibition of the Works and Industry of All Nations, held between May 1 and October 15, 1851. The idea originated with Henry Cole, a minor civil servant in the Record Office, and was taken up enthusiastically by Prince Albert despite opposition from snooty Kensington residents, who complained it would attract an “invasion of undesirables who would ravish their silver and their serving maids”. A competition to design the exhibition building produced 245 rejected versions, until Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, offered to build his “Crystal Palace”, a wrought-iron and glass structure some 1848ft long and 408ft wide. The acceptance of Paxton’s radical proposal was an act of faith by the exhibition organizers, since such a structure had never been built, and their faith was amply rewarded – two hundred workers completed the building in just four months.
As well as showing off the achievements of the British Empire, it was also a unique opportunity for people to enjoy the products of other cultures. Thousands of exhibits were housed in the Crystal Palace, including the Koh-i-Noor diamond (displayed in a birdcage), an Indian ivory throne, a floating church from Philadelphia, a bed which awoke its occupant by ejecting him or her into a cold bath, false teeth designed not to be displaced when yawning, a fountain running with eau de Cologne and all manner of china, fabrics and glass.
To everyone’s surprise, six million visitors came, and the exhibition made a profit, which was used to buy 87 acres of land south of Kensington Road, for the creation of a “Museumland” where “the arts and sciences could be promoted and taught in a way which would be of practical use to industry and make Britain the leading country of the industrialized world”. The Crystal Palace itself was dismantled after the exhibition and rebuilt in southeast London in 1854, where it served as a concert hall, theatre, menagerie and exhibition space, only to be entirely destroyed by fire in 1936.
Diana Fountain
Daily: March & Oct 10am–5.45pm; April
& Sept 10am–6.45pm; May–Aug 10am–7.45pm; Nov–Feb
10am–3.45pm • Free • _test777 Knightsbridge or Lancaster Gate
Close to the Lido is the Diana Fountain, a memorial to the Princess of Wales, which opened in 2004. Less of a fountain, and more of a giant oval-shaped mini-moat, the intention was to allow children to play in the running water, but, after three people suffered minor injuries, the fountain has been fenced off and supplied with security guards, making it rather less fun for kids, who are now officially only allowed to dabble their feet. More fun is the Diana Memorial Playground, in the northwest corner of Kensington Gardens, featuring a ship stuck in sand, paving gongs and other groovy playthings.
Kensington Gardens
Daily 6am to dusk • 020 7298 2141, royalparks.gov.uk • _test777 Lancaster Gate, Queensway or High Street
Kensington
The park’s more tranquil half, west of the West Carriage Drive, is known as Kensington Gardens, and is, strictly speaking, separate from Hyde Park, though the only difference is that Kensington Gardens locks its gates at dusk. More exclusive because of the nearby royalty at Kensington Palace, the gardens were first opened to the public in George II’s reign, but only on Sundays and only to those in formal dress, not including sailors, soldiers or liveried servants. Unrestricted access was only granted in Victoria’s reign, by which time, according to the Russian ambassador’s wife, the park had already been “annexed as a middle-class rendezvous. Good society no longer [went] there except to drown itself”.
Long Water
The upper section of the Serpentine – beyond the bridge – is, officially, actually known as the Long Water, and is by far the prettiest section of the lake. It narrows until it reaches the lovely Italian Gardens, which boasts a group of five fountains, laid out symmetrically in the 1860s, in front of a pumphouse disguised as an Italianate loggia.
PETER PAN & CO
The best-known of all the park’s outdoor monuments is Peter Pan, the fictional character who enters London along the Serpentine and whose statue stands by the west bank of the Long Water; fairies, squirrels, rabbits, birds and mice scamper round the pedestal. It was in Kensington Gardens that the author, J.M. Barrie, used to walk his dog, and it was here that he met the five pretty, upper-class Llewellyn Davies boys, who wore “blue blouses and bright red tam o’shanters”, were the inspiration for the “Lost Boys”, and whose guardian he eventually became. Barrie himself paid for the statue, which was erected in secret during the night in 1912.
The rough-hewn muscleman struggling with his horse, to the southwest of Peter Pan, is G.F. Watts’ Physical Energy, a copy of the Rhodes memorial in Cape Town; to the north is a granite obelisk raised to John Hanning Speke, who was the first non-African to find the source of the Nile, and who died in 1864 after accidentally shooting himself rather than the partridge he was aiming at. Just outside the Diana Memorial Playground is the Elfin Oak, a gnarled stump from Richmond Park, carved with little animals and mystical creatures by children’s-book illustrator Ivor Innes in the late 1920s.
Pet Cemetery
To the east of the Italian Gardens, by Victoria Gate, lies the odd little Pet Cemetery, begun in the 1880s when Mr and Mrs J. Lewis Barnes buried their Maltese terrier, Cherry, here. When the Duke of Cambridge buried his wife’s pet hound at the same spot after it had been run over on Bayswater Road, it became the place to bury your pooch; three hundred other cats and dogs followed, until the last burial in 1967. The cemetery – “perhaps the most horrible spectacle in Britain”, according to George Orwell – is no longer open to the public, though you can peep over the wall.
Serpentine Gallery
Daily 10am–6pm; Teahouse mid-June to mid-Oct • Free • 020 7402 6075, serpentinegallery.org • _test777 Knightsbridge or South Kensington
In the southeast corner of the park stands the Serpentine Gallery, built as a tearoom in 1908 because the park authorities thought “poorer visitors” might otherwise cause trouble if left without refreshments. An art gallery since the 1960s, it has a reputation for lively, and often controversial, contemporary art exhibitions, and contains an excellent bookshop. Each year, the gallery also commissions a leading architect to design a funky temporary pavilion for its summer-only teahouse extension.
A second exhibition space, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, is housed in the Magazine, a former munitions depot, built in 1805, on the north side of the Serpentine, so that the military could arm themselves in the event of a “foreign invasion or popular uprising”. Designed in the style of a Palladian villa, it has been restored and extended by Zaha Hadid and features two annual commissions: a large-scale, indoor light installation and an outdoor “playscape” designed for children and adults.
Albert Memorial
45min guided tours March–Dec first Sun of
month, 2 & 3pm • £6 • 020 7495 0916, royalparks.org.uk • _test777 South Kensington
Completed in 1876 by George Gilbert Scott, the Albert Memorial, on the south side of Kensington Gardens, is as much a hymn to the glorious achievements of Britain as to its subject, Queen Victoria’s husband (who died of typhoid in 1861, aged 42), who sits under its central canopy, gilded from head to toe, clutching a catalogue for the 1851 Great Exhibition. The pomp of the monument is overwhelming: the spire, inlaid with semiprecious stones and marbles, rises to 180ft; a marble frieze around the pediment is cluttered with 169 life-sized figures (all men) in high relief, depicting poets, musicians, painters, architects and sculptors from ancient Egypt onwards; the pillars are topped with bronzes of Astronomy, Chemistry, Geology and Geometry; mosaics show Poetry, Painting, Architecture and Sculpture; four outlying marble groups represent the four continents; and other statuary pays homage to Agriculture, Commerce and other aspects of imperial economics. Albert would not have been amused: “I can say, with perfect absence of humbug, that I would rather not be made the prominent feature of such a monument…it would upset my equanimity to be permanently ridiculed and laughed at in effigy”, he once claimed.
Kensington Palace
Daily: March–Oct 10am–6pm; Nov–Feb
10am–5pm • £15 • 020 3166 6000, hrp.org.uk • _test777 Queensway or High Street Kensington
On the western edge of Kensington Gardens stands Kensington Palace, a modestly proportioned, Jacobean brick mansion bought as an out-of-town residence by William and Mary in 1689 as the king’s asthma and bronchitis were aggravated by Whitehall’s damp and fumes. Wren, Hawksmoor and later William Kent were called in to embellish the place, though the palace was actually chief royal residence for barely fifty years.
Queen Victoria was born in Kensington Palace in 1819 and spent her dull, sad childhood cooped up here with her strict mother, the Duchess of Kent, who slept with her in the same room. According to her diary, her best friends were the palace’s numerous “black beetles”. Victoria’s apartments have not been preserved, but you get to see the gloomy Red Saloon, where the 18-year-old queen held her first Privy Council meeting, just hours after William IV’s death on June 20, 1837.
Nowadays, KP – as it’s fondly known in royal circles – is the official London residence of Prince William and Kate Middleton (and the unofficial home of Prince Harry). It’s also where William’s mother, Princess Diana, lived until her death in 1997, although there’s no access to her rooms, which were on the west side of the palace, where the dukes and duchesses of Kent and Gloucester all still live.
The palace is home to the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, which doesn’t have a permanent display but there’s always a selection exhibited. Usually you get to see a few of the Queen’s dresses – from her haute 1950s wardrobe to her more suspect later penchant for peach-coloured frocks – and a selection of Diana’s over-the-top 1980s dresses.
KP’s most handsome facade faces south, behind a flamboyant statue of William III, given to Edward VII by the Kaiser. The public entrance is on the east side, and must be approached from the Round Pond, where George I used to keep his edible turtles, and the Broad Walk, a favourite rollerblading avenue; both are overlooked by a flattering statue of Queen Victoria sculpted by her daughter, Princess Louise.
INFORMATION
Tours Some of KP’s themed tours change from year to year, others, like the King’s and the Queen’s State Apartments, are permanent. Unfortunately, instead of an audioguide, the palace offers relentlessly quirky multimedia installations.
Eating To the north of the palace there’s a lovely café in Hawksmoor’s Orangery, built for Queen Anne as a summer dining room, and decorated with carving and statues by Grinling Gibbons.
King’s State Apartments
The palace’s most impressive rooms are in the King’s State Apartments, beginning with the grandiose King’s Staircase, designed by William Kent, with its Irish black marble steps, its Tijou wrought-iron balustrade and trompe-l’oeil crowds of courtiers and yeomen. Another great Kent creation is the “grotesque”-style painting on the ceiling of the Presence Chamber, which also features a lovely pear-wood Gibbons overmantle with weeping putti. Further on, the Cupola Room, with its monstrously ugly clock occupying centre stage, features another wonderful trompe-l’oeil fresco, which gives the effect of a coffered dome. The palace’s grandest room, the Long Gallery, has red damask walls hung with paintings by, among others, Tintoretto. Also of interest is the wind dial above the fireplace, connected to the palace weather vane, built for William III and still functioning.
Queen’s State Apartments
The Queen’s State Apartments begin with the Queen’s Gallery, once magnificently decorated with 154 pieces of Oriental porcelain (a mere handful remain), and instead lined with royal portraits. At the far end is one by Peter Lely, of Anne Hyde, mistress and later first wife of the future James II; they officially married after she was already heavily pregnant, causing something of a royal scandal even in the libidinous Restoration period. The Queen’s Apartments are much more modest than the King’s, wood-panelled rooms hung with Dutch works reflecting the tastes of William and Mary, so to try and boost their appeal, the curators have stepped up the multimedia theatrics. There’s an incessant whispering soundtrack to simulate gossip in the Queen’s Closet, scene of a furious quarrel between Queen Anne and her lover, the Duchess of Marlborough, after which they never saw each other again. Eighteen little chairs are displayed to represent Queen Anne’s children, all of whom pre-deceased her, including Prince William, who died after dancing too much on his 11th birthday. The best original decor is in the Queen’s Bedchamber, which boasts a four-poster bed that belonged to Queen Mary of Modena, James II’s second wife – it was here that the diminutive and corpulent Queen Anne died of gout.