Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Queen's House have all changed radically since Jones's day, making it di
cult to
imagine the impact the building must have had when it was built. The house is now
linked to its neighbouring buildings by open colonnades, added in the early part of the
nineteenth century along the course of the muddy road which the H-shaped block
originally straddled.
Inside, very few features survive from Stuart times. The
Great Hall
, a perfect cube,
remains, but Orazio Gentileschi's ceiling paintings were removed to Marlborough
House by the Duchess of Marlborough during the reign of Queen Anne. The
southeastern corner of the hall leads to the beautiful
Tulip Staircase
, Britain's earliest
cantilevered spiral staircase, whose name derives from the floral patterning in the
wrought-iron balustrade. The only other significant interior decoration is upstairs, in
the room intended as the bedchamber of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, which retains
its ceiling decoration from the 1630s.
21
The art collection
The rooms of the Queen's House now provide a permanent home for the museum's
vast
art collection
. Downstairs, there are paintings, portraits and models illustrating the
history of royal Greenwich. Upstairs, in among the naval battles and portraits of
admirals, there are works by the likes of Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Lely,
Kneller and Myrtens, as well as twentieth-century works by o
cial war artists, plus one
by Lowry and even an Alfred Wallis. Look out, too, for the oil paintings by the oil
cial
artists on board Cook's last two voyages to the Pacific, Thornhill's portrait of a naval
pensioner - the sort who would have inhabited the Royal Hospital for Seamen - and
Zoffany's unfinished, nightmarish
Death of Captain Cook
. There's a typically infatuated
portrait of Lady Hamilton as Ariadne by Romney, a Canaletto of Greenwich, painted
from Island Gardens, and the only major British portrait of (a wistful and dreamy)
Napoleon, painted while he was a prisoner on board the
Bellerophon
. Downstairs, one
room is set aside for Turner's
Battle of Trafalgar, 21st October, 1805
, his largest work and
only royal commission, which was intended for St James's Palace.
Greenwich Park
Daily 6am to dusk •
W
royalparks.org.uk • Cutty Sark or Greenwich DLR
Greenwich Park
is one of the city's oldest royal parks, having been enclosed in the
fifteenth century by the Duke of Gloucester, who fancied it as a hunting ground.
Henry VIII was particularly fond of the place, introducing deer in 1515, as well as
archery and jousting tournaments, and sword-fighting contests. The park was opened
to the public in the eighteenth century, but it was only after the arrival of the railway
in 1838 that it began to attract Londoners in great numbers. In 1894, a young
French
anarchist
called Martial Bourdin was killed in the park, outside the Royal Observatory,
when the bomb he was carrying in a brown-paper bag exploded. Joseph Conrad used
the unexplained incident as the inspiration for his novel
he Secret Agent
.
The descendants of Henry's deer are now safely enclosed within
The Wilderness
, a
fenced area in the southeast corner where they laze around “tame as children”, in Henry
James's words. Don't miss
Vanbrugh Castle
, halfway down Maze Hill, on the east side
of the park, England's first mock-medieval castle, designed by the architect John
Vanbrugh as his private residence in 1726. Note, too,
Queen Caroline's Bath
, by the
park's southern wall, which is all that remains of the house where the queen used to
hold her famous orgies - the rest of the house was destroyed by her estranged husband
George IV after she left the country in 1804. If you're heading for the Ranger's House,
the best approach is via the semicircular
Rose Garden
, laid out in front of it, which is
worth a visit itself from June to August.
One of the park's chief delights is the view over to the Isle of Dogs from the steep
hill crowned by a statue of
General James Wolfe
(1727-59), who spent part of his
childhood in Greenwich, lived near the park and is buried in St Alfege. Wolfe is famed
