A Space I Love S2 – The Banqueting House roof with Lee Prosser

Historic Royal Palaces Podcast

Historic Royal Palaces

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

4.6 • 635 Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2023

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the fourth part of this series, Curator Lee Prosser takes us into a hidden space at the Banqueting House, once part of the great Whitehall Palace.

It may not be the famous Rubens ceiling, but Lee will reveal how the roof space of the Banqueting House is a piece of living history, with a rich past and an important role for the future.

For information on visiting the Banqueting House, go to:

https://www.hrp.org.uk/banqueting-house/

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.
0:22.8	So please get ready to escape to the past with us.
0:31.5	Today I'm at the heart of government. We're in Whitehall between the houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square, a street that's just a stone throw from number 10 Downing Street and horse guards parade.
0:44.3	And the street today is lined with very impressive government ministries, government buildings.
0:50.3	But one which is often overlooked is a very special building for us. It's one of the
0:55.9	buildings that the historic royal palace manages, and it's known as the banqueting house. So today,
1:01.3	I'm here at the banqueting house, exploring one of Britain's great treasures. And the banqueting
1:06.1	house today is the only substantial surviving fragment of the great royal palace of Whitehall, which was
1:12.8	largely burned down in 1698, and only this building really survived. And what we have today are
1:19.1	essentially two big rooms. We have an underground grotto, a voltage chamber, and then above us,
1:25.2	we have the original banqueting hall. But actually I think there
1:28.0	are three rooms because as well as the grotto and the banqueting hall we also have something
1:33.7	very special which very few people get to see but which I absolutely love and that is the roof
1:38.8	that covers all of the building. So what we're going to do now is go up and explore the roof in a little
1:45.5	bit more detail. And I hope I can bring some of what interests me to the wider public.
1:57.0	As we go up the staircase, we pass a really lovely portrait of the banqueting house's most famous personality,
2:05.6	which is King Charles I, who of course many people will know was actually executed outside the banqueting house,
2:12.6	and is one of the reasons why this is a real hot spot for British history.
2:30.3	At the top, you enter what must be one of the most gorgeous architectural spaces in the country. It's a very large columned hall with balconies on either side, but the real treasure is the
2:37.0	acres and acres of ceiling paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish artist, which was
	...

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