Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
bishop of York,
Whitehall Palace
was confiscated and embellished by Henry VIII after a
fire at Westminster made him homeless; it was here that he celebrated his marriage to Anne
Boleyn in 1533, and where he died fourteen years later. Described by one contemporary
chronicler as nothing but “a heap of houses erected at diverse times and of different models,
made continuous”, it boasted some two thousand rooms and stretched for half a mile along
the Thames. Not much survived the fire of 1698, and subsequently, the royal residences
shifted to St James's and Kensington. Since then, the key governmental ministries and of-
fices have migrated here, rehousing themselves on an ever-increasing scale.
The statues dotted along Whitehall today recall the days when this street stood at the centre
of an empire on which the sun never set, while just beyond the Downing Street gates, in the
middle of the road, stands Edwin Lutyens'
Cenotaph
, commemorating the dead of both
world wars. Eschewing any kind of Christian imagery, the plain monument is inscribed
simply with the words “The Glorious Dead” and remains the focus of the country's Remem-
brance Sunday ceremony, held here in early November.
REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY AT THE CENOTAPH
BANQUETING HOUSE
Whitehall Westminster 020 3166 6000,
www.hrp.org.uk
.
Daily 10am-5pm.£5.
MAP
One of the few sections of Whitehall Palace to escape the 1698 fire, the Banqueting House
was one of the first Palladian buildings to be built in England. The one room open to the
