Remodelled, Rejected, Restored, Reinterpreted: The Many Incarnations of Kensington Palace

Abstract

S ince the publication of Simon Thurley’s monograph on Hampton Court Palace in , there has been a need for a similar multi-disciplinary study of Kensington Palace. This book charts the architectural, court, cultural and social history of the building from its inception to the present day, going beyond the palace to include the history of the suburb of Kensington from medieval to modern times including detailed histories of the monarchs and courtiers who lived in or were associated with it. Usually treated as a side-note in the history of royal palaces, the authors seek to demonstrate that ‘Kensington holds an important place in the history of the modern monarchy’ (p. ), thereby rehabilitating a building which, since its construction over three centuries ago, has had more detractors than advocates. Howard Colvin called it ‘utilitarian and cheap’ (p. ) in comparison with Hampton Court Palace; to Queen Victoria it was ‘this poor old palace’ (p. ). Kensington Palace was built around a pre-existing Jacobean building between  and  and survived seventeenth-century disparagements of its lack of grandeur as ‘a patch’d building’ (p. ) to become the ‘hub of fashionable society’ by the s thanks largely to Queen Caroline (p. ). It was rejected as a primary royal residence by George III upon his accession in , after which it lay neglected and fell into disrepair until its piecemeal mending and partition to provide apartments for the royal family from c. . Despite this partition, and bomb damage during the Second World War, two phases of restoration around the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries saw the palace become first the home of the London Museum and later a heritage attraction in its own right whilst remaining a home for members of the royal family. Co-authored by six curators from Historic Royal Palaces, the chapters are arranged broadly chronologically and grouped into five themes: ‘Kensington before the Palace’, ‘ARoyal Home’, ‘Georgian Kensington’, ‘The Aunt Heap’, and ‘Public Attraction and Private Home’. Part , ‘Kensington before the Palace’, provides the history and topography of the suburb of Kensington from medieval times to the seventeenth century, noting the importance of Kensington’s location ‘on the road that led directly to the palace of Whitehall, allowing a swift journey to the court and the city’. It goes on to describe the construction c. – for Sir George Coppin, probably by John Thorpe, of a house which would become the nucleus of Kensington Palace.