Kensington Palace: A Historic Royal Residence in London
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Very High
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- British, English
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page19 sections
History
Kensington Palace is a historic royal residence in the United Kingdom, in London, that developed from a two-storey Jacobean mansion built in 1605 by Sir George Coppin. The palace became a favoured residence of British monarchs after William III and Mary II acquired the property in 1689 and commissioned its enlargement.
From Nottingham House to royal palace
The original mansion stood in the village of Kensington and was later known as Nottingham House. In the summer of 1689, William III and Mary II bought it from Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham and 7th Earl of Winchilsea, for £20,000. They sought a residence more suitable for William’s asthma than Whitehall Palace, whose position near the River Thames exposed him to fog and flooding.
Sir Christopher Wren, the Surveyor of the King’s Works, enlarged the house for the joint monarchs. The royal court moved to Kensington Palace shortly before Christmas 1689. St James’s Palace remained the official seat of the Court, but Kensington became the preferred residence of British monarchs for the next seventy years. Mary enlarged her apartments after the first building campaign. Following a fire in 1691, the King’s Staircase was rebuilt in marble and a Guard Chamber was added. William also commissioned the South Front, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and including the King’s Gallery.
Mary II died of smallpox at Kensington Palace in 1694. William III died there in 1702, shortly after being brought from Hampton Court following a fall from his horse. His immediate cause of death was pneumonia.
Anne and the early Georgian court
Queen Anne continued the extensions begun by William and Mary. The palace was the setting for the final dispute between Anne and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, whose friendship ended after an argument on 6 April 1710. Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, had died at Kensington Palace in October 1708, and Anne herself died there on 1 August 1714.
George I created three new state rooms and commissioned William Kent to decorate the royal apartments between 1722 and 1727. Kent’s painted decoration included the King’s Grand Staircase, completed in 1724, where forty-five figures from the Georgian court appear. Among them are the king’s Turkish servants Mahomet and Mustapha, Peter “the wild boy,” Kent himself, and Kent’s mistress. George I also added an apartment on the north-west side for his mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal.
George II was the last reigning monarch to use Kensington Palace. At Queen Caroline of Ansbach’s request, Charles Bridgeman redesigned Kensington Gardens, retaining the Serpentine, the Round Pond, and the Broad Walk. After Caroline’s death, George II neglected many rooms and the palace deteriorated. He died there on 25 October 1760.
Royal family residence and Victoria’s childhood
After George III came to the throne in 1760, Kensington Palace was used mainly by junior members of the royal family. Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, occupied Apartment 1 from 1805. His extensive library eventually filled ten rooms and contained more than 50,000 volumes. He also held scientific receptions there and served as president of the Royal Society.
Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, occupied rooms in the south-east corner from 1798. His daughter, Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent, was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819 and christened in the Cupola Room the following month. Edward died nine months after her birth.
Victoria spent her childhood at the palace under the Kensington System, a restrictive system of supervision imposed by her mother, Victoria, Duchess of Kent, and Sir John Conroy. In 1837, she was told there that her uncle William IV had died and that she had become queen. She held her first privy council in the Red Saloon before moving to Buckingham Palace.
Later royal occupation and wartime damage
Queen Victoria later granted apartments at Kensington Palace to members of her family and retired royal servants. Queen Mary, then Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, was born there on 26 May 1867. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, lived at the palace with her husband and later made an apartment her principal residence after becoming widowed in 1914. She died there in 1939.
During the First World War, George V allowed rooms at the palace to be used by people working for Irish prisoners of war and Irish soldiers serving at the front. He also required royal residents to follow the same rationing arrangements as the wider population.
On 14 October 1940, during the Blitz, Germany’s sustained aerial bombing campaign against Britain in the Second World War, an incendiary bomb struck the north side of Clock Court. The State Apartments and many grace-and-favour apartments were damaged. Anti-aircraft guns, sandbags, and trenches occupied the garden, and repairs continued for several years after the war.
The palace entered a period of neglect after the wartime damage and the deaths of Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice. Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, was granted part of the original Apartment 1 in 1955, and its eastern half was divided to create Apartment 1A. Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones moved into Apartment 10 after their marriage in 1960 while Apartment 1A was being renovated. Apartment 1A was gutted between 1960 and 1962, when all floors except the attic floor were removed to address rising damp. The redesigned apartment was completed for Princess Margaret and her husband, who moved in during March 1963.
Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and his wife, Princess Birgitte, moved into Apartment 1 in 1972 and raised their three children there. Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, moved from Barnwell Manor to Kensington Palace in 1994 and died in her sleep there on 29 October 2004, aged 102. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent were given Apartment 10 in 1978.
Public opening and modern royal use
By the end of the nineteenth century, the State Rooms had decaying brickwork and dry rot in the woodwork. Queen Victoria opposed demolition because Kensington Palace was her birthplace, and Parliament funded restoration completed in 1899. The State Rooms opened to the public on 24 May that year, establishing the palace’s continuing dual role as a royal residence and public museum.
Queen Mary arranged for the State Apartments to house the London Museum, now the Museum of London, from 1911 to 1914 and again from 1950 to 1976. Displays included eighteenth-century costumes and dresses worn by Queen Victoria, Queen Alexandra, and Queen Mary. The State Apartments closed intermittently during the First and Second World Wars and reopened permanently in 1949. Care of the public State Rooms passed to Historic Royal Palaces in 1989. The independent charity completed a two-year renovation in time for the 2012 Diamond Jubilee.
Apartments 8 and 9 became the London residence of the Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1981. Diana retained the residence after her divorce until her death on 31 August 1997. Her coffin spent its last night in London at Kensington Palace before leaving on 6 September for her funeral at Westminster Abbey. More than one million bouquets were placed at the palace gates and extended into Kensington Gardens. Her former residence remained vacant for ten years before being divided into two apartments.
After their marriage in 2011, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge first used Nottingham Cottage as their London residence and moved into the renovated Apartment 1A in 2013. Kensington Palace became their principal residence in 2017, although their family residence moved to Adelaide Cottage near Windsor Castle in the summer of 2022. The palace remains their official London residence and the location of their household and offices. Prince Harry lived at Kensington Palace from 2012, later occupying Nottingham Cottage, while the Duke and Duchess of Sussex remained there until the birth of their son in spring 2019. Princess Eugenie lived at Ivy Cottage from April 2018 until November 2020.
Kensington Palace is a Grade I listed building, designated on 15 April 1969. It is owned by King Charles III in right of the Crown and continues to contain public and private apartments, royal offices, staff accommodation, and residences for members of the royal family.
Remains
Kensington Palace stands within Kensington Gardens and combines Wren’s expanded royal complex with later residences, state rooms, gardens, offices, and service buildings. Wren retained the original mansion, added a three-storey pavilion at each corner, and reoriented the house towards the west. North and south wings formed a formal cour d’honneur, an enclosed forecourt, entered through an archway topped by a clock tower. The original grounds had straight lawns and formal Dutch-style gardens with paths and flower beds arranged at right angles.
State Apartments and principal interiors
King’s State Apartments
The King’s State Apartments comprise the King’s Staircase, Presence Chamber, Privy Chamber, Cupola Room, King’s Drawing Room, and King’s Gallery. The Presence Chamber contains a limewood fireplace used for receiving ministers, while the Privy Chamber was one of Queen Caroline’s preferred entertaining rooms.
The Cupola Room has an octagonal coffered dome painted in gold and blue. A flat panel at its centre carries the Star of the Order of the Garter. Brown and gold walls and woodwork contrast with white marble pilasters, doorways, and niches topped by gilded statuary. William Kent decorated the state rooms with painted trompe-l’oeil, an artistic technique that creates the illusion of three-dimensional forms on a flat surface. The King’s Drawing Room contains a copy of Venus and Cupid by Giorgio Vasari, while the King’s Gallery contains Anthony van Dyck’s Charles I at the Hunt and other paintings.
Queen’s State Apartments
The Queen’s State Apartments include the Queen’s Staircase, Queen’s Gallery, Queen’s Dining Room, Queen’s Drawing Room, and Mary II’s bedroom. Plainer than the King’s Staircase, the Queen’s Staircase gives access to the gardens. Built in 1693, the Queen’s Gallery was intended for walking, reading, and needlework. Its interiors formerly included Turkish carpets and oriental artefacts.
The Queen’s Dining Room retains seventeenth-century panelling. The Queen’s Drawing Room includes Chinese and Japanese decoration, together with the intertwined monogram of William and Mary carved into the crown moulding.
South Front and Orangery
Hawksmoor’s South Front contains the King’s Gallery, which has red accents and golden ornaments and was used for exercise and the display of paintings. The Orangery was commissioned by Queen Anne, designed by Hawksmoor, modified by John Vanbrugh, and built in 1704. Its carved interior decoration, including work by Grinling Gibbons, reflects its combined use as a greenhouse and entertaining space.
Gardens and landscape setting
Henry Wise laid out a twelve-hectare Baroque parterre, a formal ornamental garden of patterned beds, with clipped scrolling designs and trees trimmed into cones. Charles Bridgeman later removed the parterres and reshaped Kensington Gardens. The Serpentine, Round Pond, and Broad Walk retain elements of his design. Public gardens to the south and east connect the palace with Kensington Gardens and incorporate later landscape improvements that removed railings, fences, and shrubs obscuring parts of Bridgeman’s work.
Royal apartments and residential wings
Apartment 1
Apartment 1 occupies the south-west corner and incorporates much of Wren’s south range. Roughly forty interconnected rooms extend across four storeys, with principal elevations facing Kensington Gardens and Palace Green. The accommodation forms a substantial terraced house around part of Wren’s Stone Gallery, a stone-built gallery incorporated into the palace, and is reached through its own porte-cochere, a covered carriage entrance.
After its alteration after 1955, part of the Stone Gallery remained as an entrance corridor. The apartment also contains an inner hall, a sitting room opening through French doors onto a private walled garden, an office, a principal drawing room, bedrooms and dressing rooms on the second floor, and household offices and staff quarters in the basement.
Apartment 1A
Apartment 1A occupies four storeys and contains twenty rooms, including five reception rooms with fireplaces, three bedrooms, dressing rooms, two nurseries, nine staff bedrooms, three kitchens, and basement luggage, gym, and laundry areas. It overlooks a large walled garden screened from the public museum wing by frosted windows. The entrance hall has intricate crown moulding and black-and-white tiling.
Other apartments in the main palace
Apartment 2 was formed from rooms immediately below the former State Apartments in the south-east corner of the main complex. Apartment 4 occupies the north-west corner of Clock Court, where the former residence was severely damaged by fire during the Blitz and later divided into several residences. Apartment 4A, the Tower Flat, and Apartment 4B are subdivided residences in the Clock House area. Apartment 5 lies south of Princess Court and north of Clock Court, while Apartment 6 occupies the western side of Prince of Wales’s Court and was later divided into smaller flats, including Apartments 6A and 6C.
Apartment 7 occupies the north-west corner of the main palace complex. Its area formed part of the Kensington Palace Chapel during the nineteenth century. After the chapel was decommissioned in 1901, a false ceiling was inserted to enlarge the first-floor apartments. Apartment 7 was severely damaged by fire during the Blitz. Apartment 10, in the north-east section near the public gardens, occupies three storeys and contains five bedrooms and five reception rooms.
Apartments 8 and 9
Apartments 8 and 9 occupy the restored north-west wing. Before restoration, the interiors had collapsed ceilings, structural water damage, temporary corrugated roofing, and derelict rooms. Some original William Kent plasterwork had been lost or removed, so decorative elements were reproduced or simplified. The principal staircase and other Georgian interiors were reconstructed using historical photographs and government records because architectural plans were unavailable.
When the apartments served as the London residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the top floor contained a two-room nursery. The residence also included a drawing room used as Diana’s office, a television sitting room, a formal dining room, a roof garden, a greenhouse, and access to a helicopter pad.
Cottages and estate residences
Wren House is a two-storey residence north of the main building near a cluster of cottages. It has five bedrooms and five reception rooms and overlooks the palace’s walled gardens. Nottingham Cottage contains two bedrooms, two reception rooms, and a small garden, while Ivy Cottage has three bedrooms. The Old Stables is another residence within the estate. The King’s Kitchen Cottages and Upper Lodge provide staff accommodation.
Chapel and public museum
The Kensington Palace Chapel was built in the 1830s for private family services and occasions. Approximately nine metres long, it contains antique features, oak wall panelling, Renaissance-era works from the Royal Collection, and a nineteenth-century brass chandelier. After conversion into residential space, it was restored as a chapel by a conservation company in 2002.
The State Apartments contain paintings and other objects from the Royal Collection, the collection held by the British monarch in right of the Crown. Public displays concern William and Mary, the courts of George I and George II, Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Margaret, and Diana, Princess of Wales. The palace also contains approximately fifty residents, royal residences, staff accommodation, military and court offices, and market-rent housing.
