vetenskapochupplysning

Kensington Palace was the birthplace of Queen Victoria and the home of Princess Diana. King William III bought the house from the Earl of Nottingham in 1689 and had it remodelled by Sir Christopher Wren. At the time, the house was a welcome respite from the drains of Whitehall Palace. Several state rooms are open to the public. The palace is set in the middle of the graceful Kensington Gardens and is near the fashionable shopping central London districts of Kensington, Knightsbridge and Chelsea.

Kensington Palace is most famous as the home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but there’s much more to it than that. It’s one of the great undiscovered secrets of London, because most people don’t even realise that it’s open to visitors, or that it contains objects and stories covering the whole of royal history from the seventeenth century onwards.

I particularly like the way the palace captures four centuries of royal history. We go from William and Mary and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, to spectacular eighteenth-century state apartments of the Hanoverians, to the childhood of Queen Victoria to the modern royal family, Princesses Margaret and Diana are key twentieth-century Kensington residents.

It's amazing to think that Kensington Palace was originally built as a country get-away for the Royals now that its right in the middle of some of the busiest, most built up areas of London.