Hello listeners. Welcome back to this mini-series on the Historic Royal Palaces podcast.

In this four-part series, our curator's team are going to be venturing into some of our most loved spaces in the palaces.

We have chosen these spaces specially in the hope that we can transport you to some of our favourite moments in history.

We want this series to be calm and reflective

and perhaps you'll even find it a little bit moving.

So please get ready to escape to the past with us. I'm walking along the haunted gallery in the old Tudor part of the palace towards the great queen's staircase, which is the place I love today.

And hanging in the corridor here are portraits of the last Tudors.

We have Epidic, Queen Mary and Elizabeth I.

We're about to move into a very different world.

So before we enter the Queen staircase,

I just want to look out the window here into this little courtyard.

And you can see a great high wall, a real patchwork of a wall, four stories high,

and it really tells the history of this place,

because it's not just the modern Queen's stairs from the 17th century we're about to move into.

But it shows the story of the previous 150 years back to the Tudors when the great project for Henry and 8th and his new queen and Berlin was to rebuild not just the great hall, which was, they began, but also to create

a new Kings and the Queen's apartments for each of them. These were going to be enormous.

And you can read all this in the wall here. You've got bricks of all different periods, little

bits of Tudor diapering, that's the kind of criss-crossy black bricks. You've got old

Tudor windows blocked up with no glass in them.

Smart sash windows, wooden sash windows from the 17th century and repairs from later periods.

It really does show that this part of the building has been around for a long time.

But because this is a backyard of the palace used by the servants,

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