Welcome to Hampton Court Palace. On a glorious spring day I'm standing outside the front

of Henry VIII's Palace of Pleasure, one of his four favourite palaces, also Whitehall

and Grennidge and of course Windsor. But Hampton Court was his Palace of Pleasure because

it was a place he could come to hunt, to escape the plague, to play tennis, to play

bowls. It had been a palace that belonged to Cardinal Thomas Walsy. Before that it was

used by the Knights Hospitalia and in 1514 Walsy took out a 99-year lease on it and built

the front of the palace that we see today, the Tudor Palace that is. It's a palace of

two-half, of course, half of the palace is actually Baroque built in the late 17th century.

But Walsy's Palace is the brick palace, the sort of cutting edge Renaissance fabric of

the time, and has been built with diapoe work which is the burnt ends of the bricks that

form lozinge patterns in the brick. Right now Hampton Court's gate house is about half

the size, it would have been it, would have been more like that of St James's Palace.

And on the front we see two terracotta roundels which were commissioned by Walsy in 1521 from

the Florentine sculpture Giovano di Omeiano, their busts of Roman emperors and they, I suppose,

tell us about his classical learning. But they also tell us, it's a little learning

as a dangerous thing because at the front here to symbolise good rule he has a

tiberius and narrow.

I'm going over the moat now, it is never a defensible structure, despite the crenellations

that are meant to make it look like a castle.

Now I'm in base court which is the first court yard of Hampton Court, it's very big,

I'd say it's close to 250 square feet and it was a court yard built by Walsy, it was

intended to be a place to entertain. So even when Walsy who of course was on the rise built

...