Buckingham Palace has opened its doors for the annual summer opening of the State Rooms. This year, almost 6,000 visitors will have the opportunity to enjoy guided tours of the Palace’s East Wing, which is open to the public for the first time since its completion 175 years ago.
The East Wing encompasses the famous façade of the Palace and features the central balcony, where the Monarch and members of the Royal Family have gathered for public appearances since 1851, most recently for Trooping the Colour in June.
Led by expert guides, small groups of visitors will tour a series of rooms on the East Wing’s Principal Floor, which have never been accessible to the public before. These include the Centre Room, from which visitors will have a view of the balcony, the Victoria Memorial and The Mall; the Yellow Drawing Room, with its towering Chinese porcelain pagodas; and the 240-foot-long Principal Corridor, which spans the entire width of the Palace and features paintings by artists including Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Thomas Lawrence and Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Together, these rooms contain examples of the finest Chinese and Japanese porcelain and 19th-century furniture in the Royal Collection.
The East Wing was added to the Palace between 1847 and 1849 to provide space for Queen Victoria’s growing family, enclosing what had previously been a U-shaped courtyard. The build of the wing was financed through the sale of the Royal Pavilion, George IV’s seaside retreat in Brighton. The Pavilion’s contents – which reflected the King’s love of Asian art and design – were subsequently transferred to the East Wing, inspiring the Chinese-themed décor of its principal rooms. Prince Albert personally oversaw the decoration of the new wing, and the balcony was added at his suggestion.
Access has been made possible this year due to the conclusion of more than five years of improvement works to the East Wing. These essential works are part of the Buckingham Palace Reservicing Programme to upgrade the historic building’s infrastructure, improve access and preserve it for future generations.
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The temporary removal of Royal Collection items from the East Wing provided the opportunity for an extensive programme of conservation work to be carried out. The Centre Room’s spectacular glass chandelier, shaped to resemble a lotus flower, has recently been restored, and minor conservation treatment was carried out on the room’s Chinese silk wall hangings, given to Queen Victoria for her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The Yellow Drawing Room’s extraordinary Kylin Clock was fully dismantled and conserved for the first time in several decades, while the room’s 18th-century, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper was removed and painstakingly cleaned and conserved, before being reinstated. Following analysis of historic paint pigments, the walls of the Principal Corridor have been returned to their original green colour scheme, and the hang of paintings from the Royal Collection has been refreshed to reflect the wing’s Victorian history, incorporating portraits of Queen Victoria, her family and notable events in her life.
Visitors with a standard ticket for the Palace’s State Rooms will have the opportunity to tour the 19 rooms used by members of the Royal Family for official entertaining, furnished with some of the finest works of art from the Royal Collection. In July and August, for the first time in five years, the State Rooms will be open to the public seven days a week.
In the Ballroom, visitors will see the recently unveiled portrait of His Majesty The King by Jonathan Yeo, commissioned by William Charnley on behalf of the Drapers’ Company – the first completed official portrait of His Majesty since the Coronation. Another addition to the tour this year will be the Australian State Coach, usually housed in the Royal Mews, which will be on display in the Palace’s Grand Entrance Portico. Given to the late Queen by the people of Australia to mark the Australian Bicentenary in 1988, it is the only royal coach to have an on-board generator, providing electric windows and central heating.
A visit to the State Rooms can be combined with a Garden Highlights Tour, which incorporates areas of the Garden not usually seen by the public, including the Herbaceous Border, the Summer House, the Rose Garden, the Waterloo Vase, and the Palace tennis court, where King George VI played Fred Perry in the 1930s. This year, family-friendly Garden Highlights Tours are also available, specifically designed for families with young children.
A Royal Day Out ticket provides discounted admission to all three venues at Buckingham Palace: the State Rooms, the Royal Mews, and The King’s Gallery, where this summer visitors can learn the stories behind some of the most celebrated photographs ever taken of the Royal Family in the exhibition Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography.
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