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| Hampton Court |
My American Women's "English Experience" group recently took a field trip to Hampton Court, but this time we got to see areas of the palace that are not open to the public.
After 1737, when royalty stopped living in the palace, rooms were created from the large expanse to form "Grace and Favour" Apartments. These residences were offered rent-free to those who had given dedicated service to Crown or country. Usually, widows of servicemen were offered the apartments. The residents were generally of a notable status or ranking but who had fallen on hard times financially. So from about 1750 to 1950, portions of the palace were like an apartment block of housing. This is not something they tell you about on the regular tour of the grounds.
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| One of the Grace and Favour Apartment dwellers |
We started our special tour with the Historic Royal Palaces curator by having tea, coffee, and cookies in one of the former apartment rooms. I like how our English Experience trips always start out in such a civil manner with refreshments.
While the refreshments were genteel, the apartments we saw were in disarray, almost in shambles. The rooms have sat empty and unused for years but you can still get an idea of what they were like. The apartments span different time periods, some had fireplaces in each room for warmth, some had light bulbs hanging down low from the ceiling in order to provide maximum light from the dim bulbs. One bathroom still contains a claw foot tub. You can see where wardrobes stood by the lack of paint on the wall when the rooms were painted around them. Ancient looking light switches were obviously added when electricity was installed.
We were allowed to take photos but were asked not to put them on social media sites since the apartments are not open to the public. I took a couple of pictures from general public areas. This one shows the stairs leading to some of the apartments. An iron gate keeps them private.
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| Private stairs to the apartments |
This is a picture showing the progression of doorbells and nameplates through different time periods:
There is still a basket on a rope and pulley at the top of some of the stairwells. The elderly living on the top floors could have their groceries delivered in the basket on the ground floor and then they could draw the basket up to avoid using the stairs. The curator said one of the former grocery boys is still alive and remembers delivering to Hampton Court.
In 1838, just in the middle of the 200 years that residents were living in the Grace and Favour Apartments, the young Queen Victoria opened the palace to visits by "all her subjects without restriction". The residents complained of the visitors sticking their heads in their windows and gawking at them. I guess that's the price you pay for living rent-free in a historic royal palace.
The question is what to do with these former living spaces? It would be nice to restore them but to what time period? Visitors to the palace want to see authenticity so the curators must be careful not to change them too much. It is one of the challenges of presenting a landmark with 500 years of royal history.
To learn more, visit these websites:
http://www.hrp.org.uk/HamptonCourtPalace/anewcommunityandrestoration
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