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Historic Royal Palaces Podcast

A Space I Love S2 – Queen Charlotte's Drawing Room with Polly Putnam

Historic Royal Palaces Podcast

Historic Royal Palaces

London, Palace, Tower, Historic, Conservation, Royal, Lecture, Learning, Kensington, Hampton, Kew, Banqueting, History, Court, Of, House, Palaces

4.6635 Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2023

⏱️ 19 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

 

This week marks the penultimate episode in our six-part mini-series on special places in our palaces. We’re following Curator Polly Putnam into Queen Charlotte’s Drawing Room in Kew Palace, the home of the Royal Family during the illnesses of George III. 

This small and domestic-feeling room holds a lot of sadness from the past, but from this Polly is able to reflect on finding joy in the meaning of home. 

If you’d like to find out more on visiting Kew Palace go to: https://www.hrp.org.uk/kew-palace/visit 

To learn more about the lives of Queen Charlotte and George III go to: https://www.hrp.org.uk/kew-palace/history-and-stories  

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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

0:06.0

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.

0:15.0

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.

0:22.6

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

0:32.6

So I'm in Royal Botanic Gardens Q to look at our tiniest palace today, little Q Palace.

0:45.1

It's a lovely kind of gabled building with a red wash in it.

0:51.7

And usefully for me, it has the date that it was built above the door so

0:56.4

when I give tours I can't forget so it has 1631 and it was built for a merchant called

1:03.0

Samuel Fortry as a kind of a wealthy merchant's house which I think you can see it became the home

1:10.5

of the Prince of Wales by 1736.

1:16.6

So Prince Frederick, father of George III, son of George II,

1:21.6

lived here upon the accession of George II with his sisters. It then becomes known as the Prince of Wales House

1:31.3

and so actually George III would have lived here as a young prince.

1:36.3

So this is very much his boyhood home.

1:39.3

There was another building just across the lawn called the White House

1:43.3

which was this grand villa,

1:45.0

which eventually was taken over by Frederick and later his wife, Augusta, and then George III.

1:51.0

So that was the main home.

1:53.0

But this was always kind of the little annex that belonged to the Prince of Wales.

1:58.0

So it's where George the Third was educated. It was also where George

2:03.6

the fourth was educated in this little home in this quite beautiful garden. But its most

2:09.6

famous history is the fact that in 1801, in 1804, it's where George the third was treated

...

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