Buckingham Palace is the London residence and administrative headquarters of the monarch of the United Kingdom.

It was built in the early 18th century for John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1648-1721), expanded and remodeled during the 19th and 20th centuries on several occasions.

Origins & History

In the Middle Ages, the site of the future palace formed part of the Manor of Ebury and the marshy ground was watered by the river Tyburn, which still flows below the courtyard and south wing of the palace.

Ownership of the site changed hands many times and owners included Edward the Confessor (c.1003-1066) and his queen consort Edith of Wessex (c.1025-1075) in late Saxon times, and, after the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror (c.1028​-1087).

William (c.1028​-1087) gave the site to Geoffrey de Mandeville (1092-1144), who bequeathed it to the monks of Westminster Abbey.

In 1531, Henry VIII (1491-1547) acquired the Hospital of St James, which became St James's Palace, from Eton College, and in 1536 he took the Manor of Ebury from Westminster Abbey.

Various owners leased it from royal landlords, and the freehold was the subject of frenzied speculation during the 17th century. By then, the old village of Eye Cross had long since fallen into decay, and the area was mostly wasteland.

Possibly the first house erected within the site was that of a Sir William Blake (1608-1657), around 1624 and the next owner was George Goring (1608-1657), who from 1633 extended Blake's house, which came to be known as Goring House, and developed much of today's garden, then known as Goring Great Garden.

When the improvident Goring (1608-1657) defaulted on his rents, Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington (1618-1685) was able to purchase the lease of Goring House and he was occupying it when it burned down in 1674, following which he constructed Arlington House on the site, the location of the southern wing of today's palace, the next year.

In 1698, John Sheffield (1648-1721) acquired the lease and he later became the first Duke of Buckingham and Normanby.

The mansion was built in 1703 and later acquired by King George III (1738-1820) in 1762 to be used as a private residence.

During the 19th century it was enlarged, principally by architects John Nash (1752-1835) and Edward Blore (1787-1879), who constructed three wings around a central courtyard.

Buckingham Palace became the London residence of the British monarch on the accession of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) in 1837. The last major structural additions were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the East Front, which contains the well-known balcony on which the British royal family traditionally congregates to greet crowds.

It should be noted that a German bomb destroyed the palace chapel during the Second World War (1939-1945) but the Queen's Gallery was built on the site and opened to the public in 1962 to exhibit works of art from the Royal Collection.

The original early 19th century interior designs, many of which survive, include widespread use of brightly coloured scagliola and blue and pink lapis, on the advice of Sir Charles Long (1760-1838).

King Edward VII (1841-1910) oversaw a partial redecoration in a Belle Époque cream and gold colour scheme. However, many small reception rooms are furnished in the Chinese regency style with furniture and fittings brought from the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and from Carlton House.

The palace has 777 rooms and the palace gardens are the largest private gardens in London, originally created by Capability Brown (1716-1783), but redesigned by William Townsend Aiton (1766-1849) and John Nash (1752-1835).

The man-made lake was created in 1828 and receives water from Serpentine Lake, the lake in Hyde Park.

The state rooms, used for official and state entertaining, are open to the public each year for most of August and September and on some days in winter and spring.

Housing Evolution

Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818) died in 1818 and two years later her husband George III of the United Kingdom (1761-1820) would.

After his accession to the throne in 1820, George IV (1762-1830) continued the renovation intending to create a small, comfortable home. However, in 1826, while the work was in progress, the King decided to modify the house into a palace with the help of his architect John Nash (1752-1835).

The new building was built in stone in a French neoclassical style, and two more wings were created leaving an open inner courtyard. This is the structure that remains to this day, except for the eastern façade that closes the patio, which is of more recent creation.

In that place stood an impressive triumphal arch inspired by the Arch of Constantine in Rome, which cost 34,450 pounds sterling.

George IV of the United Kingdom (1762-1830) wanted to crown him with an equestrian statue of his, but the monarch died earlier and Parliament decided to install the statue in Trafalgar Square. The interiors of the palace were also wanted to be of incomparable beauty, as George IV (1762-1830) had commissioned the interior design from Charles Long, 1st Baron Farnborough (1760-1838), who based his works on inlays of plaster and lapis lazuli.

The death of George IV of the United Kingdom (1762-1830) in 1830 meant that the interior decoration was not completed until the reign of William IV of the United Kingdom (1765-1837), a man of simple tastes.

In the years before George IV's death, the cost of the still unfinished palace was causing complaints in parliament and in the press.

William IV of the United Kingdom (1765-1837) chose Edward Blore (1787-1879) as project manager, who made a model similar to that projected by John Nash (1752-1835) but at a lower price. The total cost of remodeling the palace was £ 719,000.

Although the kings held functions and receptions in the palace's state rooms, they never resided there, preferring Clarence House. After the Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire in 1834, he offered to convert Buckingham Palace into a new Houses of Parliament, but his offer was declined.

Most of the reception rooms were furnished at the time and are still maintained today, using the Chinese style with furnishings from the Royal Brighton Pavilion and Carlton house.

Buckingham Palace became the principal royal residence in 1837, on the accession of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), who was the first monarch to reside there; her predecessor William IV (1765-1837) had died before it's completion. While the state rooms were a riot of gilt and colour, the necessities of the new palace were somewhat less luxurious. It was reported the chimneys smoked so much that the fires had to be allowed to die down, and consequently the palace was often cold.

Ventilation was so bad that the interior smelled, and when it was decided to install gas lamps, there was a serious worry about the build-up of gas on the lower floors. It was also said that staff were lax and lazy and the palace was dirty.

Following the Queen's marriage in 1840, her husband, Prince Albert (1819-1861), concerned himself with a reorganisation of the household offices and staff, and with addressing the design faults of the palace.

The great east wing of the palace, currently the main facade of the palace, was built after the marriage of Queen Victoria (1819-1901).

In 1847, the couple found the palace too small for the life of the court and their growing family, so it was decided to close the courtyard to make it an inner courtyard. In this wing is the balcony from which the royal family receives their subjects.

Before Prince Albert's death, the palace was frequently the scene of musical entertainments, and the most celebrated contemporary musicians entertained at Buckingham Palace.

The composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) is known to have played there on three occasions and Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) and his orchestra played there when in England.

Under Victoria (1819-1901), Buckingham Palace was frequently the scene of lavish costume balls, in addition to the usual royal ceremonies, investitures and presentations.

Widowed in 1861, the grief-stricken Queen withdrew from public life and left Buckingham Palace to live at Windsor Castle, Balmoral Castle and Osborne House.

In 1901, the new king, Edward VII (1841-1910), began redecorating the palace. The King and his wife, Queen Alexandra (1844-1925), had always been at the forefront of London high society, and their friends, known as the Marlborough House Set, were considered to be the most eminent and fashionable of the age.

Buckingham Palace, the Ballroom, Grand Entrance, Marble Hall, Grand Staircase, vestibules and galleries were redecorated in the Belle Époque cream and gold colour scheme they retain today, once again became a setting for entertaining on a majestic scale but leaving some to feel Edward's heavy redecorations were at odds with John Nash's original work.

The last major building work took place during the reign of George V (1865-1936) when, in 1913, Sir Aston Webb (1849-1930) redesigned Blore's 1850 East Front to resemble in part Giacomo Leoni's Lyme Park in Cheshire.

This new, refaced principal façade was designed to be the backdrop to the Victoria Memorial, a large memorial statue of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) created by sculptor Sir Thomas Brock (1847-1922), erected outside the main gates on a surround constructed by architect Sir Aston Webb (1849-1930).

George V (1865-1936), who had succeeded Edward VII (1841-1910) in 1910, had a more serious personality than his father, greater emphasis was now placed on official entertaining and royal duties than on lavish parties.

George V's wife, Queen Mary (1867-1953), was a connoisseur of the arts, and took a keen interest in the Royal Collection of furniture and art, both restoring and adding to it.

Queen Mary (1867-1953) also had many new fixtures and fittings installed, such as the pair of marble Empire-style chimneypieces by Benjamin Vulliamy (1747-1811), dating from 1810, which the Queen had installed in the ground floor Bow Room, the huge low room at the centre of the garden façade.

Queen Mary (1867-1953) was also responsible for the decoration of the Blue Drawing Room and this room, 69 feet long, previously known as the South Drawing Room, has a ceiling designed by John Nash (1752-1835), coffered with huge gilt console brackets.

In 1999 it had 19 rooms, 52 master bedrooms, 188 employee rooms, 92 offices, and 78 bathrooms. Although it may seem large, it is small compared to the Tsar's Palace in St. Petersburg, the Episcopal Palace in Rome, the Royal Palace in Madrid, and tiny compared to the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Potala in Tibet.

The size is best seen from the inside, looking at the inner courtyard, and a minor renovation was carried out in 1938, turning the John Nash (1752-1835) designed northwest pavilion into a swimming pool.

Interior

The front of the palace measures 355 feet across, by 390 feet deep, by 80 feet high and contains over 830,000 square feet of floorspace.

The principal rooms are contained on the piano nobile behind the west-facing garden façade at the rear of the palace. The centre of this ornate suite of state rooms is the Music Room, it's large bow the dominant feature of the façade. Flanking the Music Room are the Blue and the White Drawing Rooms.

At the centre of the suite, serving as a corridor to link the state rooms, is the Picture Gallery, which is top-lit and 55 yards long.

The Gallery is hung with numerous works including some by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669), Anton Van Dyck (1599-1641), Pedro Pablo Rubens (1577-1640) and Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675); other rooms leading from the Picture Gallery are the Throne Room and the Green Drawing Room.

The Green Drawing Room serves as a huge anteroom to the Throne Room, and is part of the ceremonial route to the throne from the Guard Room at the top of the Grand Staircase.

The Guard Room contains white marble statues of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) and Prince Albert (1819-1861), in Roman costume, set in a tribune lined with tapestries and these very formal rooms are used only for ceremonial and official entertaining but are open to the public every summer.

Directly underneath the State Apartments are the less grand semi-state apartments. Opening from the Marble Hall, these rooms are used for less formal entertaining, such as luncheon parties and private audiences. Some of the rooms are named and decorated for particular visitors, such as the 1844 Room, decorated in that year for the state visit of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia (1796-1855), and the 1855 Room, in honour of the visit of Emperor Napoleon III of France (1808-1873).

At the centre of this suite is the Bow Room, through which thousands of guests pass annually to the Queen's garden parties.

Between 1847 and 1850, when Edward Blore (1787-1879) was building the new east wing, the Brighton Pavilion was once again plundered of it's fittings and as a result, many of the rooms in the new wing have a distinctly oriental atmosphere.

The red and blue Chinese Luncheon Room is made up from parts of the Brighton Banqueting and Music Rooms with a large oriental chimney piece designed by Robert Jones (1857-1933) and sculpted by Richard Westmacott (1775-1856).

The Yellow Drawing Room has wallpaper supplied in 1817 for the Brighton Saloon, and a chimney piece which is a European vision of how the Chinese chimney piece may appear.

In the center of this wing is the famous balcony with the glass doors of the central hall behind, and this room is decorated in Chinese style following the taste of Queen Mary in the late 1820s. Across the noble area of ​​the east wing is an immense gallery, known modestly as the main hall, and has mirrored doors and walls that reflect porcelain pagodas and other oriental decorative elements.

The Chinese Luncheon Room and Yellow Drawing Room are situated at each end of this gallery, with the Centre Room in between.

When paying a state visit to Britain, foreign heads of state are usually entertained by the Queen at Buckingham Palace and they are allocated an extensive suite of rooms known as the Belgian Suite, situated at the foot of the Minister's Staircase, on the ground floor of the north-facing Garden Wing. It contains the 1844 Room, a sitting room that also serves as an audience room and is often used for personal investitures. Narrow corridors link the rooms of the suite, one of them is given extra height and perspective by saucer domes designed by John Nash (1752-1835) in the style of Soane.

A second corridor in the suite has Gothic-influenced cross-over vaulting.

The Belgian Rooms themselves were decorated in their present style and named after King Leopold I of Belgium (1790-1865), uncle of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) and Prince Albert (1819-1861).

King Edward VIII (1894-1972) lived in these dependencies during his short reign.

During the current reign, court ceremonies have undergone a radical change and entrance to the palace is not simply reserved for the upper class.

Formal court dresses have been abolished. In other reigns, men who did not wear a military uniform were required to wear a special 18th century costume.

At night, women were required to wear tailed suits and tiaras on their heads, and this rigidity of clothing was maintained until First World War (1914-1918), when Queen Mary (1867-1953) of Teck decided to follow fashion by shortening her skirt. Earlier, she had asked a court lady to cut off the skirt to see her husband's reaction, but King George V (1865-1936) was horrified and the queen's skirt went out of fashion.

In 1924, Labor Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937) was the first man received by a monarch in the palace dressed in a suit; however, it was a special concession.

After Second World War (1939-1945), the ceremony was replaced by less formal afternoon receptions, omitting the requirement court evening dress and in 1958, the Queen abolished the presentation parties for débutantes, replacing them with Garden Parties, for up to 8,000 invitees in the Garden.

The young ladies entered and bowed, then stepped back performing a choreography with the skirts of her dress that were a certain length and repeated the bow before the queen.

The ceremony was very pompous and the queen decided to eliminate it as elitist and typical of antiquity, but they were replaced by garden parties, more frequent and which a wider spectrum of British society can attend.

The throne room is currently used for special visits to the queen as recently as her jubilee, and it's in this room that royal wedding photographs are taken.

The investiture, which includes knighthood appointments, with the traditional imposition of the sword, takes place in the Victorian ballroom, built in 1854. Measuring 37 by 20 meters, it's the largest room in the palace and has replaced the throne room in importance and use.

During the investiture, the queen does not sit on the throne, she stands in front of the dais, under a large vaulted velvet pavilion called a shamiana or baldachin that was used at the coronation of George V (1865-1936) as emperor at the Durbar in Delhi in 1911.

Gala banquets also take place in the ballroom. These dinners take place on the first night of the visiting heads of state. Dinner is served on gilt china, and the largest and most formal reception to take place at Buckingham Palace is in November, when the Queen receives the resident diplomatic corps in London.

On this occasion all the cabins are used, as the royal family passes through all of them initiating a procession through the large north doors of the gallery. Other smaller ceremonies take place in Room 1844, where lunches and sometimes meetings are held.

Since the bombing of the chapel in Second World War (1939-1945), family liturgical celebrations have been held in the music room, and the queen's first three children were baptized there, in a special gilded font.

The biggest ceremonies of the year are the garden parties, where 9,000 people come to congregate having tea and sandwiches, and once the guests arrive, the national anthem sounds and the queen leaves the arch room.

World Wars

During the First World War, which lasted from 1914 until 1918, the palace escaped unscathed. It's more valuable contents were evacuated to Windsor, but the royal family remained in residence.

The King George V of the United Kingdom (1865-1936) imposed rationing at the palace, much to the dismay of his guests and household but to the King's later regret, David Lloyd George (1863-1945) persuaded him to go further and ostentatiously lock the wine cellars and refrain from alcohol, to set a good example to the supposedly inebriated working class. However, the workers continued to imbibe, and the King was left unhappy at his enforced abstinence.

Later, Edward VIII (1894-1972) of the United Kingdom told a biographer that his father got a glass of port wine every morning, while the queen bathed his fruit salad in champagne.

The sons of the kings were photographed at that time serving tea to the officials in charge of the palace security.

During the Second World War, which broke out in 1939, the palace was bombed nine times. The most serious and publicised incident destroyed the palace chapel in 1940 and this event was shown in cinemas throughout the United Kingdom to show the common suffering of rich and poor.

One bomb fell in the palace quadrangle while George VI (1895-1952) and Queen Elizabeth (1900-2002) were in the palace, and many windows were blown in and the chapel destroyed. War-time coverage of such incidents was severely restricted, however.

The King and Queen were filmed inspecting their bombed home; it was at this time the Queen famously declared: "I'm glad we have been bombed. Now I can look the East End in the face".

On 15 September 1940, known as Battle of Britain Day, an RAF pilot, Ray Holmes (1914-2005) of No. 504 Squadron RAF rammed a German Dornier Do 17 bomber he believed was going to bomb the Palace. Holmes had run out of ammunition and made the quick decision to ram it. Holmes bailed out and the aircraft crashed into the forecourt of London Victoria station.

On VE Day, 8 May 1945, the palace was the centre of British celebrations. The King George VI (1895-1952), the Queen Elizabeth (1900-2002), Princess Elizabeth (1926) and Princess Margaret (1930-2002) appeared on the balcony, with the palace's blacked-out windows behind them, to cheers from a vast crowd in The Mall.

Today

In addition to being the residence of the queen, the palace is the workplace of 450 people, and each year some 50,000 people are welcomed at garden parties, receptions, audiences and banquets.

The Mall, a ceremonial approach route to the palace, was designed by Sir Aston Webb (1849-1930) and completed in 1911 as part of a grand memorial to Queen Victoria (1819-1901).

The reddish color of the pavement is reminiscent of the red carpets that were unfolded in earlier times, and this route is the one used by the caravans of heads of state visiting the United Kingdom and also by the royal family in state celebrations such as the opening of Parliament.

Like the palace itself, the garden is filled with works of art, and one of the most important is the Waterloo Vase, a large urn created by Napoléon Bonaparte (1769-1821) to celebrate his anticipated victory, which was delivered unfinished in 1815 to George IV (1762-1830).

The king ordered the work to be completed with the intention of placing it in the Waterloo room of Windsor Castle, but the weight of 15 tons made it impossible to place it in a building.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Queen Elizabeth II (1926) and her late husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh (1921-2021), and the Earls of Wessex resided in the palace.

Compared to other British castles and palaces, Buckingham is relatively new, although it symbolizes the British monarchy. An estimated one million people came to Buckingham on the 50th anniversary of the Queen's coronation.

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