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Royal Residences - Palaces, treasures and private apartments in and around London
5
days
from
£3,120
Book today with a deposit from
£468
22nd - 26th September 2027
Tour highlights
- Five centuries of royal building, from Wolsey’s Hampton Court to Barry and Pugin’s Westminster.
- Up to three private, out-of-hours visits, including Windsor’s state apartments and St James’s Palace.
- Palaces as statements of national might – and of the tastes of the monarchs who lived in them.
- Two 5* hotels: Great Fosters, a 16th-century house near Windsor, and the Royal Horseguards in Whitehall.
On the night of 20 November 1992, fire broke out in the private chapel at Windsor Castle and spread through some of its grandest rooms. Steven Brindle, who leads this tour, was among the historians closely involved in the restoration that followed – and few people know better how a building occupied by nearly every monarch since William the Conqueror has been made, remade and lived in.
Windsor and Hampton Court are of a size and magnificence unrivalled among Britain’s secular buildings. Yet England has no Versailles, no Caserta, no Winter Palace. Royal building flourished under Henry VIII, fell away abruptly after his death in 1547, and did not revive until George III and George IV. In between, monarchs were restrained by a parsimonious Parliament, a national dislike of Continental absolutism and, long before 1688, a chronic shortage of money.
Decorum nonetheless demanded that the sovereign’s rooms outshine even the grandest noble apartments. The processional sequences of guard chambers, presence chambers and state bedrooms at Windsor and Hampton Court were statements about the nation as much as the monarch. Personal taste played its part too: some sovereigns wanted the latest style at maximum splendour; others longed for something smaller.
The result is a wonderfully varied itinerary. Alongside the two great palaces are glorious fragments of lost ones – Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House at Greenwich, his Banqueting House at Whitehall, the Great Hall at Westminster – and more modest houses that monarchs actually preferred to live in. Modesty is relative: Kensington Palace ranks among the finest historic houses in England.
Then there are the contents. The Royal Collection is one of the greatest in the world, and the palaces remain richly furnished with paintings, sculpture, furniture, porcelain and textiles: Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar at Hampton Court, Van Dyck’s portraits of Charles I at Windsor, Rubens’s ceiling at the Banqueting House, painted for the king who would walk beneath it to his execution in 1649.
Itinerary
Appointments for private tours cannot be confirmed until 2027. In particular, the visit to St James’s State Apartments is dependent on the Royal Family’s diary and cannot be confirmed until c.3 months before the date of the visit.
The coach leaves central London at 9.45am. Kensington Palace was a Jacobean villa when William and Mary bought it in 1689; Christopher Wren enlarged it for them, and William Kent painted its staircase and state rooms for George I. Queen Victoria was born here in 1819. Drive to Egham and settle into Great Fosters. In the evening, a private tour of the state apartments at Windsor Castle, when the visitors have gone. Founded by William I, its Norman motte still dominating the skyline, Windsor has been embellished by successive monarchs into one of the most impressive palaces in the world. First of two nights in Egham.
Begun by Cardinal Wolsey in 1515, seized and enlarged by Henry VIII, and partly rebuilt by Wren for William III and Mary II from 1689, Hampton Court joins the most sumptuous surviving Tudor palace to the most magnificent 17th-century building in Britain. Henry’s Great Hall and Chapel Royal, Wren’s state apartments, Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar, and formal gardens and park running down to the Thames.
Return to Windsor Castle to explore more of this vast complex, including St George’s Chapel, begun by Edward IV in 1475 and one of England’s finest Gothic buildings, and the Albert Memorial Chapel. In the late afternoon, a private visit to the State Apartments of St James’s Palace, built by Henry VIII in the 1530s and still the official seat of the royal court. Then the Tudor portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, among them Holbein’s cartoon of Henry VIII for the lost Whitehall mural, followed by dinner at the gallery’s rooftop restaurant. First of two nights in London.
By fast river bus down the Thames to Greenwich. Of the Tudor palace where Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were born, only the Queen’s House remains: begun by Inigo Jones in 1616 for Anne of Denmark, it was the first truly Classical building in Britain. Around it rose the Royal Hospital for Seamen by Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh, the finest ensemble of Baroque architecture in the country. In the afternoon, Spencer House, built in 1756–66 for the first Earl Spencer and a rare survivor of London’s aristocratic palaces. Its Palladian and neoclassical interiors, including James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s Painted Room, have been restored to their Georgian splendour and hung with fine furniture and paintings. Overnight London.
Westminster Hall, built by William II in 1097–99 and the largest hall in Europe in its day, was given its spectacular hammerbeam roof by Richard II’s carpenter Hugh Herland around 1400. It is the great medieval survivor of a palace largely destroyed by fires in 1512 and 1834. Barry and Pugin’s Houses of Parliament, the most richly ornamented of Victorian buildings, rose in its place and remain a royal palace. Whitehall, once among the largest palaces in Europe, burned in 1698; only the Banqueting House survives, Inigo Jones’s epoch-making building with its ceiling by Rubens. The tour ends at lunchtime.
Expert speaker
Dr Steven Brindle
Dr Steven Brindle. An architectural historian, Steven read History at Oxford and wrote his doctorate on the architecture of late-medieval Spain. He worked for English Heritage for 34 years and was closely involved in the restoration of Windsor Castle after the 1992 fire. His publications include Brunel: The Man Who Built the World (2005), Windsor Castle: A Thousand Years of a Royal Palace (2018) and Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530–1830 (2023). He now lives in Portugal. X: @StevenPBrindle
Practicalities
Two sharing: £3,120. Single occupancy: £3,840.
Hotel accommodation; breakfasts and four dinners with wine, water and coffee; transport by private coach, and journeys by Thames waterbus; all admissions; all tips; all taxes; the services of the lecturer and tour manager.
Great Fosters, Egham. Located between Windsor and Hampton Court, Great Fosters is a 5-star hotel in a Grade One listed building of the 16th and 17th centuries, sympathetically restored and surrounded by acres of gardens and park. Bedrooms vary in size and décor, but many are furnished with antiques and all are well equipped with modern conveniences. Royal Horseguards Hotel, London. A 5-star hotel just off Whitehall and within walking distance of, or a short taxi ride to, most of the London palaces. The style is that of an international hotel and bedrooms are comfortable with all mod cons. Single rooms are doubles for sole use throughout.
Participants need to be good walkers and have stamina. On occasion there is a walk of 20 minutes or more between the coach (or water bus) and the palace, and some of the visits are of two hours or more without a break. Average distance by coach per day: 20 miles.
Between 10 and 22 participants.
Dates & prices
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2027
Date
Speaker
Price
Date:
22nd - 26th September 2027
Speaker:
Dr Steven Brindle
Price:
from £3,120
(Based on two sharing)Combine with
We are happy to advise on combining this itinerary with another tour or event. Please contact us for information about linking accommodation and transport.
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