Transcription
Hello! You're at Buckingham Palace, the official residence of Her Majesty The Queen, and you're going to come with me for a tour. So please, come on in.
You're now standing inside the grand entrance of Buckingham Palace. Buckingham Palace is the home of Her Majesty The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the other members of the Royal Family. So it's a beautiful place, but it's a working, working palace, and that's what's really important to remember. My role as Master of the Household is a very ancient role; it's over 400 years old. It started off with James the First in 1603. So, in modern terms, I would say people would call me the Chief Operations Officer for the Queen.
I'd now like to introduce you to Anna Reynolds. Anna, come forward. Anna is the Curator for Paintings for the Royal Collection Trust. I'm going to take you on an expedition through Buckingham Palace today, pointing out some of the highlights and showing you the various different rooms that make up the Palace. But this wasn't always a palace; Buckingham Palace wasn't always a palace. It was actually originally a smaller house called Buckingham House, and it belonged to the Duke of Buckingham, which is who it's named after. It was bought as a private family home by George III. His son, George IV, decided that he wanted to make it more magnificent and turn it into a palace. He engaged the architect Nash—John Nash—to make changes to the palace, make the rooms bigger. He actually made the entrance hall here; he lowered the floor so that the ceiling would appear taller, and he added these amazing flights of stairs that really give you this sense of excitement as you move up into the rest of the state rooms.
Something that you might spot are all the different marble columns that are around this room. There were originally 104 here in the Marble Hall; that's why it's called the Marble Hall. In 1829, one very, very large block of marble was brought along the Thames, and it actually weighed as much as two double-decker buses. So you can imagine it took 17 horses to transport it here. So we're going to continue up the grand staircase. One of the most expensive things in the palace is something that you might not expect: it's the balustrade that you can see here, making up the banister. This is actually made of gilt bronze—so it's bronze that's been cast into this very ornate foliate design and then covered in a very thin layer of gold—and it makes up this grand staircase. As visitors move up from the darkness of the grand entrance into the light up here, it creates this magnificent feeling.
After you come up the grand staircase and through the Guard Room, you enter the Green Drawing Room. I think it's quite easy to understand why it's called the Green Drawing Room. The walls have always been hung with green silk, and they're replaced about every 30 years. But you can also see here you've got green upholstered furniture and green Sèvres porcelain on the various different mantelpieces and on the cabinets that are around the room. Now, one of my favorite pictures in this, in the whole collection and in this room, is this one here, which shows three daughters of George the Third. I love this painting because it shows three children who actually lived here when this was Buckingham House, when it was still a private home.
Now we're going to go into the Throne Room. This magnificent room is the Throne Room. As you walk up the grand staircase, you progress through the different rooms and you reach the Throne Room, and you find the throne. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's throne is on the left, and then her husband's, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is on the right. Now, what makes this room so special and feels so special is the fact that it was designed by a theatre designer, so that element of theatricality is everywhere. There are swags of curtains that look like curtains that close onto a stage. You've got these amazing sparkling chandeliers that now are electric light, but originally, when this room was built, would have been candlelight.
We're now standing in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace, which is an incredibly long room that was created by knocking through three rooms in the original Buckingham House. It's right in the middle of the palace, this room, and it was made for George IV because he wanted to display his amazing collection of paintings. George IV absolutely loved paintings, and he bought particularly Dutch art, which is what you can see surrounding on the walls at this end of the room. The other type of paintings that are in here—there are lots of Italian pictures—and one that I'd like to point out to you is this view of Venice by the Italian artist Canaletto. Now, Canaletto—we have, we have the largest collection of Canalettos in the Royal Collection that exists anywhere in the world. There are over 50 in the Royal Collection, and they were all bought as a group. They came into the collection by George III, actually in 1762, when he bought Consul Smith's collection; he just bought an entire group of pictures and used them to decorate his palaces.
Now, to tell you a bit more about what this room looks and feels like on the evening of a State Banquet, I'm going to pass over to the Master again. Thank you very much. Well, you can imagine this is the centerpiece of a State visit, the State Banquet, which is a fabulous event and really spectacular. As you can imagine, the atmosphere is electric. Exactly where I'm sitting, standing now, is where the Queen was; it is the top table. So the Queen is sitting here; she can see me and eyeball me very clearly if anything's going wrong, and the Head of State is on her right-hand side. You can imagine there are over 200 people in this room: we've got 171 guests, and the tables are groaning with silver and gold, with over five and a half thousand pieces of silver, over two thousand pieces of cutlery—knives, forks, spoons—and over a thousand glasses, all Georgian glasses, well over 200 years old, each of them. And we've got about 80 of my staff serving these 171 people four courses, five types of wine, at the end of which the finale is created by 12 pipers walking around the ballroom, filling the whole room with a glorious sound of bagpipes, and they, they really do sound fantastic. So it gives a completely new meaning to all surround sound.
Now this is the White Drawing Room. It's another one of the rooms that the Queen uses for entertaining, so receiving guests, and you can see it's one of the most ornate, with amazing chandeliers, um, yellow upholstered furniture, and then over in that corner there's a gold piano. It's a piano made by the firm called Erard, and it was bought by Princess, Queen Victoria when she was Queen, and she actually played the piano very, very well with her husband. And this piano is decorated with mischievous monkeys making music and getting up to all sorts of trouble. Another amazing work of art in this room is this desk, which is from the late 18th century and it was made by the cabinet maker Jean-Henri Riesener. It's inlaid with all sorts of different woods, and originally when it was made the woods would have been different colours, so the patterns that you can see, which are flowers and fruit, would have stood out much more strongly. But even within six months of it being made, they'd faded to all these different kind of browns. Now this desk is actually very special because it has a complicated mechanical mechanism inside that Riesener was known for, and you can actually only open the lower drawers when the top of the desk is rolled back. So it has kind of secret drawers and secret hidden compartments. And there's actually another secret in this room that I'm going to show you if you follow me. Not everyone gets to see this. This is a room where the Queen can suddenly appear into this room, and that's because there's a secret door. When you look at this wall, you see the fireplace, and on either side you see cabinets with porcelain and candelabra on top, but the cabinet on the left actually opens, and it reveals the secret door. It's very heavy, and that's where the Queen comes in from her private apartments when she's meeting guests here.
But I just wanted to say thank you so much for letting me show you around Buckingham Palace. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you've enjoyed finding out more about the rooms and about some of the amazing paintings and works of art here. Well, we really hope you've enjoyed your tour of Buckingham Palace with Anna. We've certainly enjoyed having you, and thank you so much for coming to join us. Now, if you've got any interest at all in anything else you've seen, anything caught your eye, whether it's a picture or work of art, um, please don't hesitate to visit our website: it's royalcollection.org.uk. Lots of information there, particularly about schools resources, any school trips, any learning resources or teaching resources, all on that website for all the occupied palaces—specifically Buckingham Palace, but also Windsor Castle in Berkshire, England, and also the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh in Scotland. But thank you so much for coming again, and please come back and visit us again soon. Goodbye! [Music]