Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Closet, the
Lower
Orangery
, built to house the queen's orange trees during the winter.
Past here is the
King's Private Dining Room
, its table laden with pyramids of meringues
and fruit and its walls hung with eight full-length portraits of Queen Mary's favourite
ladies-in-waiting (known as the “Hampton Court Beauties”), for which the German-
born painter Godfrey Kneller received a knighthood.
Young Henry VIII's Story
Several early Tudor rooms, with striking linenfold panelling and gilded strapwork
ceilings, are now used to display
Young Henry VIII's Story
. This is a worthy attempt
by the palace to portray Henry in his virile youth, during his happy, twenty-year
marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Interactive screens help tell the story
of the Battle of the Spurs at Guinegate in 1613, when Henry led his troops from the
front, and of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry's famous meeting with the French
king, François I, in 1620.
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Henry VIII's Kitchens
After a surfeit of opulent interiors, the workaday
Tudor Kitchens
come as something
of a relief. Henry VIII quadrupled the size of the kitchens, large sections of which
have survived to this day and have been restored and embellished with historical
reconstructions. Past the Boiling Room and Flesh Larder (not for squeamish
vegetarians) you come to the
Great Kitchen
, where a fire is still lit in the main hearth
every day. This kitchen is only one of three Henry built to cope with the prodigious
consumption of the royal court - six oxen, forty sheep and a thousand or more larks,
pheasants, pigeons and peacocks were an average daily total. The tour ends in Henry's
vast
Wine Cellar
, where the palace's Rhineland wine was stored. At each main meal, the
king and his special guests would be supplied with eight pints of wine; courtiers had to
make do with three gallons of beer.
The Gardens
The gardens' magnificent
Broad Walk
runs for half a mile from the Thames past Wren's
austere East Front to the putti-encrusted Flower Pot Gate, and is lined with some of
the country's finest Victorian herbaceous borders. Halfway along lies the indoor
Royal
Tennis Court
, established here by Wolsey (a keen player of Real Tennis himself ), but
extensively restored by Charles II. If you're lucky, you might even catch a game of this
arcane precursor of modern tennis, though the rules are incredibly tricky.
Fanning out from the Broad Walk is William's
Fountain Garden
, a grand, semicircular
parterre, which in William's day featured box hedges, thirteen fountains and dwarf yew
trees pruned to look like obelisks. A fair number of these “black pyramids”, as Virginia
Woolf called them, have been reduced to chubby cone shapes, while a solitary pool
stands in place of the fountains, and the box hedges have become plain lawns. A
semicircular canal separates the Fountain Garden from the Home Park beyond, its
waters feeding Charles II's
Long Water
, Hampton Court's most Versaillean feature,
which slices the Home Park in two.
Privy Garden
Overlooked by Wren's magnificent South Front is the formal
Privy Garden
, laid out
as it would have been under William III; the twelve magnificent wrought-iron panels
at the river end of the garden are the work of Jean Tijou. To the west, you can peek
into the
Pond Gardens
, which were originally constructed as ornamental fish ponds
stocked with freshwater fish for the kitchens, and feature some of the gardens' most
spectacularly colourful flowerbeds. Further along, protected by glass, is the palace's
celebrated
Great Vine
, grown from a cutting in 1768 by Capability Brown and
averaging about seven hundred pounds of Black Hamburg grapes per year (sold at
the palace in September).
