The lost palaces of London
five royal houses that vanished, and the fragments still standing in the street
London was a city of palaces and it lost almost all of them. Fire took the largest, the Civil War took another, and neglect and demolition took the rest. What survives is fragmentary and hiding in plain sight: a banqueting hall on Whitehall, a gatehouse on Richmond Green, a rose window on a Southwark side street. This is where each palace stood and what is left of it.
Why a city loses five palaces
Royal houses were working buildings, not monuments. A monarch who preferred somewhere else stopped paying for the roof, and a palace with a leaking roof becomes building material within a generation. Two of the five here were deliberately sold for salvage.
Fire did the rest. Whitehall, the largest palace in Europe by the 1690s, burned in 1698 because someone left linen drying near a charcoal brazier. The medieval Palace of Westminster burned in 1834 because the exchequer's obsolete tally sticks were being disposed of in a furnace under the House of Lords.
The places
Greenwich: the Palace of Placentia
Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich SE10
Henry VIII was born here, and so were Mary I and Elizabeth I. It was the Tudor dynasty's favourite riverside house, and Charles II demolished it to build something more fashionable that was never finished. The Old Royal Naval College now occupies the site, and Tudor rooms beneath it were unearthed recently during work on the buildings above.
Whitehall
Banqueting House, Whitehall SW1
By the end of the seventeenth century this was the largest palace in Europe, with well over a thousand rooms sprawling from the river to St James's Park. It burned almost completely in January 1698. One building survived: Inigo Jones's Banqueting House of 1622, with a Rubens ceiling, which is open to visitors and is the only part of Whitehall Palace anybody can still stand inside.
Richmond Palace
Richmond Green TW9
Henry VII rebuilt the old palace of Sheen after a fire and renamed it after his earldom. Elizabeth I died here in 1603. After the Civil War Parliament sold it for its materials and it was pulled apart. The gatehouse and the old wardrobe building survive on Richmond Green, converted into houses, with Henry VII's arms still over the gate.
The Palace of Westminster
Westminster Hall and the Jewel Tower SW1
The medieval palace was the principal royal residence until Henry VIII moved to Whitehall, after which it housed Parliament. Almost all of it burned in October 1834. Two substantial pieces escaped: Westminster Hall, begun in 1097 and roofed with the great hammerbeam roof of the 1390s, and the Jewel Tower of 1365 across the road, which is the quieter and more visitable of the two.
Winchester Palace
Clink Street, Southwark SE1
Not royal but episcopal: the London house of the bishops of Winchester, who owned a large liberty in Southwark and licensed much of what happened in it. The great hall burned in 1814 and was largely forgotten until bombing and redevelopment exposed it. Its rose window still stands, free-standing, in a wall on Clink Street, and it is the single most surprising ruin in central London.
Questions
Which of these can actually be visited?
The Banqueting House on Whitehall, Westminster Hall and the Jewel Tower are all open to visitors, though on different terms and not always daily. The Winchester Palace rose window stands in a public street and costs nothing. The Richmond fragments are private houses, seen from the Green. Greenwich is a working site whose Tudor levels are not routinely open.
Why did Whitehall Palace burn down?
A fire started on 4 January 1698, by most accounts in linen left to dry too close to a charcoal brazier in a room above the Stone Gallery. It spread through a palace built up piecemeal over two centuries with little in the way of firebreaks. William III chose not to rebuild it and moved the court to Kensington and St James's.
What survives of Greenwich Palace?
Below ground, more than was assumed. Two Tudor rooms, including what appears to be a service range with lead-glazed floor tiles, were found under the Old Royal Naval College during building work and reported in 2017. Above ground the Tudor palace is entirely gone; Queen's House, next to the site, was begun after it.
Is anything left of the medieval Palace of Westminster?
Westminster Hall, which is the largest surviving medieval hall in England and still in use for lyings-in-state and addresses; the Jewel Tower; the cloisters and the crypt chapel of St Mary Undercroft, both inside the modern building. Everything else visible today is Barry and Pugin's replacement, built after 1840.
Elsewhere on this site: guide to London statues, strange museums.