Kensington Palace (2): Queen’s Apartments

This is the oldest surviving part of the palace, dating to the original work carried out by William and Mary when they purchased the house in 1689 as a country alternative to Whitehall Palace in Westminster. The Queen’s apartments are on the first floor overlooking the gardens. The first room you enter is the long gallery where the Queen was able to undertake pastimes such as walking, reading and needlework. Today there is also a display from the fine collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain that Queen Mary acquired during her time at Kensington.

The Long Gallery
The Long Gallery
Fireplace in Long Gallery with display of Pocelain
Fireplace in Long Gallery with display of porcelain

Leading off from this is the Queens closet and then her private dining room.

Queens Dining Room
Queens Dining Room

Next to this is the Queens drawing room.

Queen's Drawing Room
Queen’s Drawing Room

The final room in the suite is the Queens bedchamber.

DSCN2413a

 

In all, it is a relatively modest set of apartments for a monarch. But then Kensington wasn’t meant to be a palace for all the frills and trimmings of monarchy but a place for the King and Queen to escape to from the busy life of Whitehall.

2 Comments

  1. Glad you enjoyed your visit. It is a difficult to imagine now that at the time the royal family bought the palace Kensington was a village in the country outside of London.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.