Hello listeners, welcome to this new mini-series on the Historic Royal Palaces podcast.

I'm Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator, and in this six-part series, our curator's team will be venturing into some of our favourite spaces in the palaces.

Now, my colleagues and I have chosen these spaces especially in the hope that we can transport you to some of our favourite moments in history.

So please get ready to escape to the past with us.

I've just walked all the way from Kew Palace down through the gardens and along the riverside,

very much as George III would have done in the 18th century, on his way to what I think is one of Q's hidden gems,

which is Queen Charlotte's Cottage. And I've just arrived here in front of this building,

where many of the visitors who come to the gardens don't see unless they're very intrepid

and then they might walk into the more remote parts of the gardens, which you wouldn't think

was a remote place, but in fact there are some very, very quiet corners of Kew Gardens.

And here in the middle of it, in what was known as the wilderness, is Queen Charlotte's Cottage,

a very unprepossessing building, but nevertheless one that architecturally at least is quite grand.

We're in the Royal Botanic Gardens Q, which today is one of the greatest scientific institutions for botany in the world.

But it hasn't always been that way.

In the 18th century, the origins of Q, Q Gardens, was really as a royal pleasure ground.

It was the garden to the royal palace.

It was owned principally by King George III and Queen Charlotte.

And it was the foundations that he laid here in the 18th century.

Plant collecting, collecting animals, studying scientific elements

of ecology that really led to the establishment of the botanic gardens that we have today.

So where we're standing is actually in the middle of a typical 18th century private royal estate.

I'm Lee Proser and I'm one of the buildings

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