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Kensington Palace is a royal residence situated within Kensington Gardens in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London, England. It has served as a residence for the British royal family since the 17th century and is currently the official London residence of several royals, including the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, and Princess Eugenie alongside her husband, Jack Brooksbank. The term "Kensington Palace" is often used as a metonym for the offices of the royals who reside there.
Today, the State Rooms of Kensington Palace are open to the public and are managed by Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity that operates without public funding. The palace's offices and private living quarters remain the responsibility of the Royal Household. Additionally, Kensington Palace showcases numerous paintings and other artifacts from the Royal Collection.
Kensington Palace was originally a two-storey Jacobean mansion built by Sir George Coppin in 1605 in the village of Kensington.
Shortly after William and Mary assumed the throne as joint monarchs in 1689, they began searching for a residence better suited for the comfort of the asthmatic William. Whitehall Palace was too near the River Thames, with its fog and floods, for William's fragile health. In the summer of 1689, William and Mary bought the property, then known as Nottingham House, from the Secretary of State Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, 7th Earl of Winchilsea, for £20,000. They instructed Sir Christopher Wren, Surveyor of the King's Works, to begin an immediate expansion of the house. In order to save time and money, Wren kept the structure intact and added a three-storey pavilion at each of the four corners, providing more accommodation for the King and Queen, and their attendants. The Queen's Apartments were in the north-west pavilion and the King's in the south-east.
Wren re-oriented the house to face west, building north and south wings to flank the approach, made into a proper cour d'honneur that was entered through an archway surmounted by a clock tower. The palace was surrounded by straight cut solitary lawns, and formal stately gardens, laid out with paths and flower beds at right angles, in the Dutch garden fashion. The royal court took residence in the palace shortly before Christmas 1689. For the next seventy years, Kensington Palace was the favoured residence of British monarchs, although the official seat of the Court was and remains at St. James's Palace, which has not been the actual royal residence in London since the 17th century.
Additional improvements soon after included Queen Mary's extension of her apartments by building the Queen's Gallery. After a fire in 1691, the King's Staircase was rebuilt in marble and a Guard Chamber was constructed, facing the foot of the stairs. William had constructed the South Front, to the design of Nicholas Hawksmoor, which included the Kings' Gallery where he hung many works from his picture collection. Mary II died of smallpox in the palace in 1694. In 1702, William suffered a fall from a horse at Hampton Court and was brought to Kensington Palace, where he died shortly afterwards from pneumonia.
After William III's death, the palace became the residence of Queen Anne. She had Christopher Wren complete the extensions that William and Mary had begun, resulting in the section known as the Queen's Apartments, with the Queen's Entrance, and the plainly decorated Wren designed staircase, that featured shallow steps so Anne could walk down gracefully. The apartment complex was primarily used by the Queen to give access between the private apartments and gardens.
Queen Anne's most notable contribution to the palace were the gardens. She commissioned the Hawksmoor-designed Orangery, modified by John Vanbrugh, that was built for her in 1704. The level of decoration of the interior, including carved detail by Grinling Gibbons, reflects its intended use, not just as a greenhouse, but as a place for entertaining. A magnificent 12-hectare (30-acre) baroque parterre, with sections of clipped scrolling designs punctuated by trees formally clipped into cones, was laid out by Henry Wise, the royal gardener.
Kensington Palace was the setting of the final argument between Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and Queen Anne. The Duchess, who was known for being outspoken and manipulative, was jealous of the attention the Queen was giving to Abigail Masham, Baroness Masham. Anne's husband, Prince George of Denmark, had died at Kensington Palace in October 1708, and the Duchess's insensitive acts afterwards compounded the tension. Their friendship came to an abrupt end on 6 April 1710, with the two seeing each other for the last time after an argument in the Queen's Closet. Queen Anne died at Kensington Palace on 1 August 1714.
George I spent lavishly on new royal apartments, creating three new state rooms known as the Privy Chamber, the Cupola Room and the Withdrawing Room. He hired the-then unknown William Kent in 1722 to decorate the state rooms, which he did with elaborately painted trompe-l'œil ceilings and walls. The Cupola Room was Kent's first commission for the King. The octagonal coffering in the domed ceiling was painted in gold and blue, and terminated in a flat panel decorated with the Star of the Order of the Garter. The walls and woodwork were painted brown and gold to contrast with the white marble pilasters, doorways and niches which were surmounted with gilded statuary.
George I was pleased with his work, and between 1722, and 1727, Kent oversaw the decoration and picture hanging for all of the royal apartments at Kensington Palace. Kent's final commission was the King's Grand Staircase which he painted with 45 intriguing courtiers from the Georgian court, including the King's Turkish servants Mahomet and Mustapha, Peter 'the wild boy', along with himself and his mistress. King George I enlarged the palace with the addition of an apartment, built on the north-west side, to house his mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal.
The last reigning monarch to use Kensington Palace was George II, who did not undertake any major structural changes to the palace during his reign, and left the running of the palace to his wife Caroline of Ansbach. At the request of the Queen, Charles Bridgeman, successor to Henry Wise as royal gardener, swept away the outmoded parterres and redesigned Kensington Gardens in a form that is still recognisable today: his remaining features are the Serpentine, the basin called the Round Pond, and the Broad Walk. After the death of his wife, George II neglected many rooms and the palace fell into disrepair. King George II died at Kensington Palace on 25 October 1760.
With the accession of George III in 1760, Kensington Palace was only used for minor royalty. The sixth son of George III, Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, was allocated apartments in the south-west corner of Kensington Palace in 1805 known as Apartment 1. He was interested in the arts and science and amassed a huge library that filled ten rooms and comprised over fifty thousand volumes. He had a large number of clocks, and a variety of singing birds that were free to fly around his apartments. He was elected as president of the Royal Society and gave receptions in his apartments at Kensington Palace to men of science. The expense they incurred induced him to resign the presidency, as he preferred to employ the money in making additions to his library.
The Duke of Sussex caused quite a scandal when he married twice in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act 1772, because it had not been approved by the King. His second wife, Cecilia Underwood, Duchess of Inverness, was never titled or recognised as the Duchess of Sussex. However, she was created Duchess of Inverness in her own right in 1840. The Duke died at Kensington Palace in 1843. As he had lived beyond his means and amassed substantial debts, his possessions, including the library, were sold after his death. The Duchess of Inverness continued to reside at Kensington Palace until her death in 1873.
Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, the fourth son of King George III, was allocated two floors of rooms in the south-east corner of the palace, below the State Apartments, which he renovated for his use. The apartments were next to his near-blind sister Princess Sophia. His daughter, Alexandrina Victoria, was born on 24 May 1819, and her christening conducted in the Cupola Room the following month. The Duke of Kent and Strathearn died nine months after the birth of his daughter.
She grew up in the confines of the palace in an unhappy and lonely childhood as a result of the Kensington System adopted by her mother, Victoria, Duchess of Kent, and the domineering Sir John Conroy, her mother's comptroller of the household. Princess Sophia fell under the sway of Conroy, who took advantage of her senility and blindness. She frequently served as his spy on the Kensington household, as well as on her two elder brothers. Conroy squandered most of her money until she died in 1848, at Kensington Palace.
In 1837, Princess Alexandrina Victoria was awakened to be told that her uncle, King William IV, had died and that she was now queen. She took the regnal name of Victoria and held her first privy council in the Red Saloon at the palace. The Queen promptly moved to Buckingham Palace. She granted rooms in Kensington Palace to her family and retired retainers, who included the Duke and Duchess of Teck, parents of Queen Mary (great-grandmother of King Charles III), who was born at Kensington Palace on 26 May 1867. In 1873, Princess Louise (then Marchioness of Lorne, later Duchess of Argyll), resided in the apartment with her husband, the Marquess of Lorne (later the Duke of Argyll), departing after he was appointed Governor General of Canada for Rideau Hall.
The couple returned after his tenure, and Louise used her art studio at the apartments to design and sculpt the Statue of Queen Victoria, Kensington Palace. The apartment became her primary residence upon her widowhood in 1914 before her death in 1939. In 1955, the apartment was given to the widowed Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, and her children until her death in 1968. Louise's younger sister, Princess Beatrice, was given by Queen Victoria the apartments once occupied by the Queen and her mother below the State Apartments.
During World War I, George V allowed a number of rooms in the palace to be used by those working for Irish POWs and Irish soldiers at the front, and decreed that its royal inhabitants adhere to the same rations as everyone else. The royal inhabitants now included Princess Helena, Duchess of Albany; Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone; and Alexander Cambridge, 1st Earl of Athlone. In 1921, upon widowhood, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven, moved into a grace-and-favour apartment at Kensington Palace. During this period, her grandson, Prince Philip, lived with her at times as she was in charge of his education. As a result of the number of royal relatives residing there during the 1920s and 1930s, Edward VIII called the palace "the aunt heap".
Kensington Palace was severely damaged during the Blitz of 1940. On 14 October it was hit by an incendiary bomb that exploded in the north side of Clock Court, damaging many of the surrounding buildings including the State Apartments, particularly the Queen's Apartments, as well as several grace-and-favour apartments of various courtiers and members of the extended Royal Family, including those of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (No. 4), the Keppels (No. 5), The Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven (No. 7), Lady Patricia Ramsay (No. 8) and Lady Bertha Dawkins (No. 9). The Headquarters of Personnel Section occupied Apartment 34, and as a result the garden was overrun with anti-aircraft guns, sandbags and trenches.
Repairs to the palace were not completed for several years, but after the war, Prince Philip stayed with his grandmother, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven in the lead-up to his 1947 marriage with Princess Elizabeth, later to become Queen Elizabeth II.
With the bombing damage and the deaths of Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice, the palace entered a period of neglect. During the 1950s, residents of the palace included the Master of the Horse, Henry Somerset, 10th Duke of Beaufort, who had married Lady Mary Cambridge – a niece of Queen Mary as the daughter of Adolphus Cambridge, 1st Marquess of Cambridge, Sir Alan Lascelles, Queen Elizabeth's private secretary and Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, who lived in the palace until her death in 1981.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Kensington Palace”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.