The Mysteries Kensington Palace - World's Greatest Palaces - S01 EP4 - History Documentary

Palaces, the most spectacular and lavish homes on earth. Luxuriously designed for the royals who wanted the biggest and the best. Behind the golden gates of these royal megastructures are incredible stories waiting to be discovered. Infamous monarchs from history and the artists, designers and engineers who turned their grand visions into a reality. These are the most opulent, flamboyant and innovative royal residences around the world. This time, Kensington Palace in London is an intimate residence that houses today's modern royals. But it began as a new home for King William III and Queen Mary II in 1689. The brainchild of architect Sir Christopher Wren, its construction was state-of-the-art and its design was the height of sophistication, making Kensington one of the world's greatest palaces. Two of the most famous royals in British history, Queen Victoria and Princess Diana, have both lived at Kensington Palace. Hidden away in London's Hyde Park, it began its life as an early 17th century Jacobean mansion before becoming a palace fit for the monarchy. Lee Prosser has been a curator here for over 15 years. Kensington's grown very organically from its origin. It was never a grand palace. It was always a retreat, a very intimate place for the king and queen. And it started life as a little courteous house, so a square block, if you like, quite modest. And then it was extended and extended and extended and extended over the years. And what that's left us with is a difficult labyrinth to navigate. And even people who work here have to think about where they're going if they want to get from one place to another because there's no logic to it and it can be quite confusing. But it's a reflection of the way that the building's just grown piecemeal over the years, really. As well as a rich history, Kensington Palace is full of refined engineering. The original roofs, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1689, are a great example. There are elements of this palace which represent technological advance, but you can't see them because they're all in the roof. And Wren built the most modern form of roof in the 17th century. He used a new structural form, which we call a king post truss, which was a new way of allowing you to have roofs which had a lower pitch and a wider span. You didn't want to see great tall roofs over your buildings in the 17th century. You wanted low, shallow pitches. And the only way to do that was to combine timber with iron and to create what's called a truss, which is a structural form of roof. And Wren used them in nearly all his buildings. But here at Kensington, we see the development of that technology. Although the king post style of roofing dates back to the ancient Romans, Wren was a master of the design and used a new interpretation, which is still used today. He was as much a mathematician and an engineer as he was an architect. And that's where I think his greatness lies. He wasn't just a man who designed the buildings. He was also concerned about the way they were put together. And so the technology that allowed him to build in a new way. As a structural engineer, I'm a bit of a fan of triangles. We like triangles, they're nice, strong shapes. Now, when Christopher Wren was designing the roof for the Kensington Palace, he had quite a long span that he wanted to cover. So if you think about, well, what's a good way to cover a big, long distance, you want to use triangles. So what he did was he had a pitched roof. So he had this kind of the two pieces of the triangle that went up. But what then happens, if you think about kind of two pieces of wood like that, when you get the weight of gravity acting on the top of it, it tends to push out. So what he did was to add an extra piece. The third side of the triangle was put in and that then becomes a tie. So instead of getting pushed, that force is going into this tie across the bottom of the triangle. But then to take it one step further, because it's quite a long distance, that tie just under gravity would start to sag a bit. So the idea was to add the king's post. And that's why it's called the king's post truss, which is another vertical piece that went from the apex of this triangle to the center of that tie at the base of the triangle. So you end up with a really stable structure. And that shape was a real innovation for its time. 300 years later, the roofs are all still in perfect condition. In 1688, before Kensington Palace existed, England was ruled by Stuart monarch, James II. But parliament made the decision to depose the Catholic king and replace him with his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, the sovereign prince of Holland, William of Orange. The political move has since been dubbed the Glorious Revolution. William and Mary were quite popular monarchs. I think there was a real sense of relief at the demise of Mary's father, James II, who was the absolute opposite, very dogmatic, very determined to stamp his views on the English people, whereas William and Mary were much more tactful, diplomatic, and very well-liked. The new monarchs needed a new home. William and Mary had to quickly assert their new regime. And the best way to do that was through bricks and mortar. They also wanted more modern, comfortable palaces. So they got building very quickly indeed. He didn't like Whitehall, and he liked Hampton Court, but it was just a bit too far, because you never know that there might have been a crisis in London. So he thought he'd better have a halfway house in the little village of Kensington, that's Nottingham House. He took it over, and with very good taste, he said, I want the best architect, which is Sir Christopher Wren. And he had carte blanche, and they literally turned it into this lovely red brick and cream building. By 1689, architect Sir Christopher Wren had made a name for himself by helping to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666. He was considered to be the best in the business. Wren was the most celebrated architect of the day. He had been very prominent in helping to transform London into very much a modern city, with the characteristic, elegant buildings that we still know today. And he was chief surveyor of the King's works and official royal architect. So, really, he was the natural choice for William and Mary. Wren was charged with turning this small, suburban villa in Kensington into a palace. He didn't demolish it, what he did was extend what they already had. So he kept the existing structure and added extra sections at the corner, extra pavilions for more accommodation. He made a proper drive up, so it would have a proper palatial drive to make it into this great, grand palace. When you're thinking about trying to amend a structure, you often need to cut into it. And you want to create maybe bigger spaces, or extend something, or add different materials to the outside of it in order to change what it looks like and the way it works. So it's really important to make sure that it's stable at every stage. So you might cut a portion out first, you need to make sure that's stable. You then add the next section, and then it needs to be stable. And the way you can do that is by putting what we call temporary works in. So what the engineers could have been doing at the time was to create these timber frames. And then once they had finished their work and they knew that all the mortar had dried up and that everything was nice and strong, then those pieces of timber could have been taken away to leave the structure in its final form. So that's a technique we still use today. Wren utilised a modern trend of construction when creating the new palace. 17th century is a great period for English brickwork. After the Great Fire of London, there'd been a call for rebuilding the whole of central London. An enormous number of bricklayers were acquired and trained up for the job. And they produced not just ordinary brickwork, but extremely beautiful brickwork, which we call cut and gauged brickwork, where each brick is cut to shape and fitted together with joints that are only half a millimetre. Kensington Palace is full of beautiful brickwork of the best quality. It was very symmetrical, with different wings leading off from that central original house. And it was also very elegant and actually quite understated compared to some of his other works. But it was undoubtedly now a house fit for a king and queen. The new royal residence of Kensington Palace was refined yet beautiful. Sir Christopher Wren had created the perfect home for William and Mary. You can see Wren in two ways. In one way, architecturally, he was a proponent of the Baroque style. And that was a continental style that didn't really catch on that much in this country. It borrowed a lot from the ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. Columns and great arches. It was very symmetrical and it was incredibly grand. It was really making a statement. If you had Sir Christopher Wren to design a building for you, there would be absolutely no doubt who was behind it. He popularised things like the sash window, for example, which was fairly modern, fairly new in the late 17th century. And he used them almost everywhere on his palaces. And after Wren, sash windows become universal. Sash windows are believed to have originated in Western Europe in the 17th century. By installing Kensington Palace with this new innovation, Wren ensured that the building was up to date with modern trends. The sash window belongs to this period. It's a completely new innovation that is coming in just at the end of the 17th century, and will then be used everywhere, so that it will become so common, and many earlier windows will be taken out and replaced with sash windows, that we just take them entirely for granted. They're good for ventilation. If you open a sash window a little bit at the bottom and a little bit at the top, you get a good flow of air coming into the room. This is an era where there are great advances in technology in buildings too. The sash window slides, so the top and the lower half slide independently. And sliding windows had been around for some time. But the great innovation was to have counterweights hidden away in pockets on either side of the window, so that when you slid the window up and down, it stayed where you put it. After the death of Queen Mary in 1694 and King William in 1702, Mary's younger sister, Anne, succeeded to the throne. The new queen made Kensington Palace her home. I think we don't know enough about Queen Anne. She's not well remembered now because her reign was fairly short, but it was marked by some very important events in our national history. One of Anne's greatest political achievements was the Acts of Union, where the governments of Scotland and England were joined. The United Kingdom, as we know it today, was born. Anne had a real soft spot for Kensington, and she spent an awful lot of time there once she was queen, probably more time than at any other of her residences. And she was quite a sociable lady. She liked to host suppers and balls and assemblies. And it was also at Kensington that her notorious relationship, in whatever form that took, with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, was played out, and it actually reached a very stormy end at Kensington. Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill's story received more attention after the release of the Oscar-winning film The Favourite. I think to look at that relationship in modern terms and to suggest that they were lovers is wrong, because they perhaps would have seen their relationship in a different way. The contemporary accounts don't really tell us anything in that detail. They just infer it, and we can make of that what we will. We do know that the film is absolutely right in portraying Sarah Churchill and her cousin, Abigail Masham, as fierce rivals for Anne's attention and for her affections. And indeed, this was really the source of a great fight between Anne and Sarah, which took place at Kensington Palace, which was never resolved. I think what happened was that Sarah Churchill became more and more contemptuous of Queen Anne, and eventually spoke to her, or snapped at her, in a way that just crossed the line. And the Queen took offence, and Sarah was banished from court. But away from the stresses and strains of her personal life, Queen Anne enjoyed her time at Kensington. It was Anne's beloved house. It was Anne's great home. And really, Kensington flowered under Anne, and the gardens in particular became the great gardens that they are now. She also had the Orangery built, which became one of the most distinctive features in the gardens at Kensington, and still is today. The Orangery is one of our architectural treasures. So this is a contribution by Queen Anne. And she had this built in 1705, ostensibly as a greenhouse, so a place for putting tender plants like oranges. But we know that she also used the building for ceremonies and for parties as well. Anne was not known for spending large amounts of money at the palace, but for the Orangery, she made an exception. All of the archives seem to suggest that Anne spent very little on the garden and tried to reduce the expenditure. But this would have been quite an extensive and elaborate construction. And to collect all these wonderful citrus plants, trees and bushes, would have been quite an undertaking, and must have looked absolutely spectacular. Orangeries have become popular across Europe in the 17th century. But the elaborate greenhouse at Kensington Palace was one of the first to be built in Britain. It is still unknown who exactly dreamt up the impressive structure. Nicholas Hawksmoor, we think, designed the Orangery. But there's an ongoing debate because we know that Hawksmoor was originally a kind of apprentice to Christopher Wren, who's got a lot of promise architecturally. And Christopher Wren recognises that and gives him the project at Kensington. So he becomes the clerk of works, and effectively he's the project manager on the site. And it's said that he built the Orangery for Queen Anne. But we think, in fact, he presented a plan to Queen Anne. And we know that Queen Anne had Sir John Vanbrugh, who was another rising architectural star of the day, whisper in her ear and she decided to go with his design instead. So today we're still uncertain whether our Orangery is designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor or Sir John Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh very often drew things out in outline, and then Hawksmoor was responsible for doing the detailed drawings. But Hawksmoor himself worked on his own as well, and was an assistant to Wren and more than capable as an architect. So there is a tendency to associate works by Hawksmoor with Vanbrugh and vice versa. To keep the tropical plants and trees warm in the British winters, it's believed the early 18th century engineers used a system created by the ancient Romans. We're not quite sure how the Orangery at Kensington was heated, but in restorations they discovered flues running under the building to what must have been a distant furnace of some kind. So it seems to have had some kind of hot air ventilation system like a Roman hippocaust. The things that were used for heating Roman baths, where you had vaults underneath the floor in which hot air was pushed. The glazier work in the Orangery was state of the art for 1705. Although it's unknown who designed the windows, they were clearly inspired by Sir Christopher Wren. This is a very good example of one of those early sash windows that were so typical of Christopher Wren's work. So you have two sort of sliding sashes, one with 16 panes of glass and the lower one with 20 panes of glass. So these are of really epic proportions. And one of the most important historical things about them was that in 1705, when this building was constructed, window glass was expensive. So if you could afford to have very large panes of glass like this, it showed that you were wealthy. And of course, who is more wealthy than Queen Anne herself? So she has the biggest, biggest windows with the biggest panes of glass. But you also need these enormous sashes because you've got trees inside. So you need to admit the maximum amount of light. But these are so big and heavy, you need two or three people just to lift them. This is the only great legacy of Queen Anne at Kensington Palace. But what a legacy. It's a really important building. It's a beautiful building. Despite desperately trying to secure a successor, the Stuart dynasty ended with Queen Anne. Anne was popular. She was quite charismatic. And it looked like the succession was going to be secured because she had a young son, George. But poor old Anne had an incredibly tragic history in that respect. She was pregnant no fewer than 17 times. And her son, George, was the only one of her children to survive. But tragically, not for long. He didn't survive long enough to be king himself. And he died whilst still a young boy, which absolutely broke Anne's heart. When Anne herself died in 1714, her Hanoverian second cousin, George I, became king of Britain. He brings with him his entourage, including his son and heir, George, Prince of Wales, and George's wife, Caroline. But the English people were very xenophobic at that time. We don't really take kindly to this royal family full of Germans. And it takes us a while to adapt. In 1722, King George decided to update Kensington Palace by adding some new staterooms. He hired a relatively unknown artist-cum-architect named William Kent. William Kent was one of those people you'd like to be around. He was a larger-than-life character. He loved good food and good conversation. He's a strange character, really, because we know he was a kind of gruff Yorkshireman who had a thick accent. And somebody said of him that he was over-fond of pork wine and pork chops, I think it was. But what he did at Kensington, which nobody had done before, was he designed the rooms, what we would call en-suite. So he designed the decor, the curtains, and he designed and had made furniture to go with them. And he really pioneered the idea of decorating a whole room together as a suite, if you like. So what he represents is a departure from the way that people had decorated their houses in the past. When deciding upon a painter for the new rooms at Kensington, George I was impressed with Kent's competitive quote. William Kent, at the time, was not very well known. The official artist was Sir James Thornhill. And Sir James Thornhill says to George, look, I can do these rooms for 800 pounds. In those times, that was a lot of money. George, being a bit of a miser, thought, crikey, that is not the amount that I want to spend on these rooms. In walks in William Kent, and he says, I will do the ceiling for 300 pounds. If you want the really expensive ultramarine blue from Lapis Lazuli, I could do it for 350. This completely sells, George. He says, fantastic, this is exactly how much I want to spend. And it gives William Kent the commission for all of the King's State Apartments. Kent's rivals claimed that William had cheated the king and used the cheap material. However, our recent research has shown that William Kent did, in fact, use the expensive pigment. George I got his money's worth. This is the first ceiling that he does, starting in 1722. Now, the reason George was so impressed with the ceiling is because it's actually a bit of an optical illusion. We call it the cupola room because cupola is the Italian word for dome. But in fact, a lot of the roofs are completely flat. So it is a trick of the eye that William Kent did to make these rooms look a lot more grand than they actually were. Making the completely flat roof of the cupola room look dome-like took incredible skill. But Kent's work at Kensington went far beyond just decoration. These changes are not just entirely cosmetic. They involve moving walls around and creating different shaped spaces and building new structures and wings and sporting servant quarters and things. So there's quite a lot of work going on, but typically for Kensington, this adds to the general higgledy-piggledy nature of the overall construction of the building. But the result is incredibly dramatic. William Kent went on to design and paint all the new apartments under George I. What epitomises William Kent's work, perhaps more than anything else at Kensington, is the king's stare. And this is where you get the sense he had free reign just to express himself. And he decorated this magnificent staircase with a mural showing the court of George I. So as a piece of social history, it's second to none. We still don't know who they all are, but we know they're probably servants. One of them might be a milliner to the Princess of Wales. Another one might be the housekeeper of the palace. So there's one gentleman who's got a set of keys in his hand, and we're pretty sure that he's a man called Henry Lowman, who was the housekeeper in charge of the day-to-day running of the building. But others, it's a bit like a detective story. We're still trying to find out who they are. But there is one face on the mural that is known for sure. A curious character, Peter the Wild Boy. George I had rather an unusual entourage, not just his extraordinary mistresses and his Turkish servants, but he also brought over a young man known as Peter the Wild Boy, who came over to England late in George's reign. Now, this boy had been discovered in Hanover, living in the woods, a sort of semi-wild existence, really. He couldn't speak. He went around on all fours. He excited, as you might imagine, a great deal of curiosity amongst the English people when he arrived. And of course, the first thing that they tried to do, the royals included, was to civilise him, make him behave as a normal human being as they saw it. He was given clothing and he was taught to behave as people expected him to, and we know that he learned a few words. More recent research suggests that Peter may have had some kind of medical condition that certainly accounted for the way he held himself, for the fact that he couldn't really stand upright. After the fascination with Peter the Wild Boy began to fade, when he began to grow up, he was given to one of the Queen's bedchamber women, who took him away to a farm. He lived till about the age of 70, an example, really, of how a person became used as an 18th-century curiosity. The fascination with curiosity and excess continued under the next Hanoverian king. George I, the large relief of the British people, actually dies in 1727, and it's his son, George II, and his wife, Queen Caroline, that inherit the King's State Apartments at Kensington Palace. And it's really under them that Kensington Palace truly flourishes. This becomes the centre of both private and public life. People want to get into one of the parties here at Kensington. However, it wasn't as easy as people thought. In order to gain access to the court, you had to wear, if you were a lady, what's called a manswear dress, as you can see here. Really, really big, wide dresses that were a status symbol. This is how they would show their wealth. Now, what's important to know about court under the Georgians was that no invitation was needed. Your invitation was instead the outfit that you wore. So these dresses often cost around £10,000 in Georgian money, which today is almost about £2 million. So they were very, very expensive. However, that was the price you had to pay to get into the parties here. Despite not being the ruling monarch, it was George II's wife, Queen Caroline, who took control of the palace. She was bright, intelligent, vivacious. She was artistic. She was witty. And that really contrasts with George II, who comes across as being fairly boring and dull. She was interested in art. She was interested in interior design. She was interested in gardening. And all of those were very important things to have a royal patronise at the time. In the early to mid part of the 1700s, England experienced what's been described as a scientific revolution. It's the age of discovery with Newton, with all of these other great scientists who are finding out a lot more about the world. And you see a decline in the old superstitious beliefs and practices as we understand more of the universe and how it works. And Caroline was a real patron of this. She loved to entertain scientists at Kensington. She liked to surround herself with the brightest minds of the age. Caroline used her progressive beliefs to help shape the parks and gardens at Kensington, which blossomed under her stewardship. Queen Caroline made some extensive changes to the gardens here at Kensington Palace, but also out into the park. Most notably, the changes of the serpentine. And the serpentine, as we know it, in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, we have her, Queen Caroline, to thank for that. The serpentine was created for Caroline by her gardener, Charles Bridgman, in 1730. It covers 40 acres and was one of the first artificial lakes designed to actually look natural. The only way of constructing a lake in this period is to excavate it literally with spades into carts, which horses would then take away so that you could then use the soil to make artificial hills, and you would use dams and weirs to divert water to then flood the hollow that you produced. Caroline also extensively developed the gardens to the north, creating small plantations with paths weaving in and around the trees, and also employed Charles Bridgman to come in and redesign parts of the park, particularly this side of the palace, and terrace these gardens from north to south. In the 18th century, the ideas of what gardens should be changes quite radically in England. It moves away from the rigid, symmetrical designs that had previously dominated to an idea that landscape should look like a natural landscape of rolling hills and lakes dotted with little follies. This is exemplified by the Kensington Palace Gardens. They are perfection in terms of the distances and sort of mathematical equations of them and where exactly something is. They are completely, perfectly regular, and that is really due to Queen Caroline and to her gardener and the efforts they made to create this beautiful, regular, perfect garden. Sadly, Caroline only got to enjoy her time as queen at Kensington for 10 years. George and Caroline had a very large family. Caroline was pretty much continuously pregnant for much of their marriage, but it was the last pregnancy and birth that led to complications that in turn would lead to Caroline's death. She suffered an umbilical hernia, and ironically, given all her investment in science, science failed her at the end when the surgeons carried out quite a disastrous operation on her, which just made things 10 times worse. And Caroline died as a result in 1737. George II was devastated by the loss of his queen. Although he didn't spend much time at Kensington, his death here has gone down in palace folklore. He actually meets his end himself in this room in 1760. This room in the time of George II was actually his toilet. And just like any other day, first thing you do when you wake up, you go straight into your bathroom. There, a valet hears a sound much louder than the usual royal wind, a huge crash, and sees that George is passed out on the floor. He's taken to his private apartments, but before the doctor or his daughter Princess Amelia could arrive, he was already dead. Post-mortem examination, George II suffered an aortic dissection, which essentially means that his aorta burst, and he unfortunately died here in 1760. Often people like to say that Elvis was the first king to die on the throne, but you can politely remind them that George II did it a few hundred years previous. After the death of George II in 1760, Kensington fell out of fashion as a royal residence. And for the next 50 or 60 years, it became actually quite dilapidated in parts because it was no longer the centre of royal life. And it was only with the arrival of Victoria that its fortunes were revived once more. Life for the future Queen Victoria began at Kensington Palace in 1819, nearly 60 years after the death of her great-great-grandfather, George II. Queen Victoria's father came to Kensington, was given an apartment here of about 50 rooms in the late 18th century, the last years of the 18th century, and he lived here on and off throughout that life. And of course, it was only at the end of his life that he actually knuckled down and got married and tried to produce an heir. And Queen Victoria, the future Queen Victoria, was the result of that marriage. Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on the 24th of May, 1819. Her father, Prince Edward, died when she was just eight months old. She grew up at Kensington under strict supervision. She was forced to endure what was known as the Kensington system. This was superintended by Sir John Conroy, her mother's favourite, who was really trying to groom her into a future queen. So there were all sorts of rules and regulations. She wasn't allowed to walk down the stairs without holding somebody's hand. And so the list went on, and Victoria just wanted to be free of all of that. One of her first directives upon becoming queen was that she just wanted to be alone. Although she was treated delicately, Victoria was only fifth in line to the throne when she was born. At the time of her birth, it wasn't certain that Victoria would one day be queen, but she was certainly a lead contender because George III's many sons had preferred to take mistresses to wives. And astonishingly, they'd had 52 illegitimate children between them, but no legitimate ones. And so this sparked what's been called the baby race between the sons of George III. The Duke of Kent, Victoria's father, was one of those. But there was always the chance that one of his brothers would go on to have a legitimate child too, and a male heir who would have taken precedence over Victoria. So it was a complete stroke of luck that she ended up on the throne. And so it came to pass, as her uncles failed to produce an heir before their deaths, the 18-year-old Victoria became the rightful successor. Early in the morning of the 20th of June, 1837, Victoria was woken with the momentous news that the king, her uncle, William IV, had died, and she was now Queen of England. Victoria went to sleep a princess and woke up a queen here at Kensington Palace. On the first day of her reign, she called a meeting of the Privy Council to the Red Saloon. And these old men, the dignitaries of Britain, welcomed their new young queen, a fresh hope for the country. After 18 miserable years living under the Kensington system, Victoria saw the palace as a prison. Once she became queen, Victoria stayed here for, I think, about two weeks. So she was required to move to Buckingham Palace, or, you know, she took control, took possession, of her new inheritance, which were the Grand Royal Palaces. And I think it was expected that she would move there and go and live in those palaces. During Victoria's reign, even though she herself had spurned Kensington, she opened up the palace for minor members of the royal family, actually including her own daughters. And from that time onwards, it became known as the Aunt Heap. This is where the minor royals were able to take up residence. And in a sense, it's a function of Kensington that continued ever after. The future Queen Elizabeth II came to Kensington many times as a child. The queen used to visit her elderly Victorian aunties, great aunts, when she was a little girl. And we have people who could remember these two little girls, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, coming to Kensington to visit their sort of very elderly and matronly aunts. I always find that a really great link between those two great ages. Even Princess Elizabeth's future husband spent a lot of time at the palace. It was home to some quite famous royals at the time, notably Prince Philip, who lived there for a number of years and was certainly a frequent visitor when his grandmother was in residence. One of my favourite stories is that when Prince Philip came back from the war and he was courting Princess Elizabeth, that's where he stayed. He stayed with his grandma in Kensington Palace. And I really like that, that he stayed with his grandma and then got in his car and drove round to Buckingham Palace where he met up with the princess, Princess Elizabeth, with Princess Margaret as escort. In the late 20th century, Kensington became the home of Queen Elizabeth's daughter-in-law. Princess Diana occupied the apartment that was once home to one of George I's mistresses. It was a very lavish apartment and Diana was instrumental in its decoration and in bringing it to a more modern style when she took up residence after her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981. An exhibition at Kensington is dedicated to the former Princess of Wales. We had about two to three hour queues at the height of the exhibition just to get into the rooms here and it really showed us just how far Diana touched people's lives, how many people will remember the dresses, where they were in the moment that they saw them, where they were when Diana herself died. So it's really, really quite beautiful for us to show these dresses because we also see people's stories as well as Diana's come to life through the dresses in the exhibition. During her time at Kensington, Diana was the most famous and most photographed woman in the world. Diana's style was perhaps more informal than was usual for a royal palace. She wanted it to be a practical family home as well as a royal residence. So even though she was married to the heir to the throne, she wanted a comfortable environment to raise their two young sons. So you get the feeling it was very much a home, not just a palace while Diana was there. She loved it. It was her favourite palace. It was very convenient for Kensington High Street and she used to go shopping herself quite a lot and she used to take the boys out incognito to the fast food restaurants and to the cinema. So you could just pop out. I mean, you can't just pop out of Buckingham Palace or really any other palace, but you can just pop out of Kensington. No one might see you. One of Diana's favourite places at Kensington was the Sunken Garden. Graham Dillamore has many stories from his time working here. I can remember seeing Princess Margaret in this garden before or walking around. And more recently, I remember the days when the Princess of Wales, Princess Diana, would speak to me in this garden on many occasions and we shared many a moment in this garden and she often admired the work that we did and the flowers that we were choosing. And very recently, we were very proud to have Harry and Meghan announce their engagement in this garden. So that was a proud moment for this garden as well. After the death of Princess Diana in August 1997, her body returned to Kensington Palace and was met by a nation in mourning. On Diana's death in 1997, Kensington Palace became the focus of public grief. There were flowers piled up there. There were flowers everywhere. The public went there to weep for her much more so than it did become a Buckingham Palace. And her funeral, her unforgettable funeral, began at Kensington Palace. Her coffin spent last night at Kensington Palace before making its journey out into the streets of London. I think that's incredibly fitting. She loved Kensington. It was where she was truly happy. It was where she wished to remain. And I think it's truly fitting that that was the last night which she rested before her funeral and then going for her final burial. It's still a place where people come to find out more about Diana, to reflect on her life. And we certainly tell the story and the impact that Diana had on various aspects of royal life. Since 1899, half of Kensington Palace has housed members of the royal family, while the other half has been open to the public as a museum. Today, we've got two sides of the palace. One is very public and one is very private. So when we look at the building from this perspective, we see the public face of the palace. It's been open to the public for 100 years. But behind and beyond where we can't see, there's a whole series of courtyards and other buildings where members of the royal family live today, very privately. And that's a tradition that's been going for 250 years, a private side and a public side. And in a way, it's a mirror of how the royal family lives today. In recent years, two of Britain's most famous royals have lived at Kensington. I think that William and Harry will always love Kensington Palace. It was where they had their childhood. It was where their mother made every effort to give them a normal childhood. There were gardens there. There was so much freedom. It was this marvelous place. And I do think that William and Harry will always have this great fondness for Kensington Palace. It was where they grew up. And I don't think that they were ever, either of them ever fully leave it. With almost half a million visitors per year, Kensington Palace continues to amaze people from all around the world. Kensington Palace is more than just a beautiful building set in a royal park. It's been the home of the monarchy for more than 300 years. It's where they've created magnificent spaces to dazzle and entertain. But it's also been a family home, an intimate home. It's where young royals like Queen Victoria have grown up before they went out into the world to rule. Many famous monarchs and characters from history have either lived here or are associated with it. It's been worked on by all the great architects over the ages, by Christopher Wren, by Nicholas Hawksmoor, by John Vanbrugh. They've all worked here. So I think the way I would characterize Kensington is it's intimate, but it has great richness.