Hello and welcome to the Historic Royal Palaces podcast.

For the next couple of episodes we're going to be following in the footsteps of the people who love and look after our six palaces.

As a charity, we're responsible for the very foundations of the buildings in which we work, as well as telling their histories and stories, and we do this in many different ways.

But the palaces have always been a place of work for many, and in this series we want to explore the jobs from the past and how to a certain extent they still exist today.

From the bricks and mortar behind the scenes to how visitors are welcomed at the Tower of London,

let's explore a day in the life of these historic jobs.

So today is a January day, and it's very dreary. It's really raining outside and it's quite cold but nowhere near as cold as it was last week which was absolutely awful.

And we're in the workshop, in the worksyard, in the brick cutting workshop and you can probably hear a bit of dripping outside

because it is the pipe outside is leaking and also we've got some drips inside the workshop

which is not good right in front of me now. My name's Emma Simpson and I run a small specialist

brickwork conservation company.

So this room is the brick cutting workshop.

I'm not sure how long it's been here, but this is where all the work, for example, on the chimneys, has always traditionally been done.

And the bench that I'm leaning up against at the moment is very, very old.

And I don't know how many chimneys

have been cut on this bench, but hundreds probably. And this is the space we use when we're

laying out chimneys and cutting bricks. It's a really, I really love the atmosphere of this room.

In fact, most people who come in here absolutely love it. It's sort of not exactly clean,

stacked up with loads of wooden boxes that are our cutting boxes when we do cut and rubbed work.

We've got a lot of bricks under the counter over there, which are waiting to be cut and rubbed.

That's our stock that we're going to be using for upcoming

jobs. And we've also in the corner got an amazing oven really, which I'm not quite sure what they

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