The Queen's House
& Old Royal Naval College

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The Queen's House (foreground) and Old Royal Naval College (behind the Queen's House) are two historic buildings located in Greenwich Park, London.

The Queen's House was built in the early 17th century and was designed by architect Inigo Jones. It was commissioned by Queen Anne of Denmark as a residence for her and her husband, King James I. The building is notable for its classical architecture and geometric design, which was revolutionary at the time. The Queen's House is now a museum that showcases a collection of art and artifacts, including works by famous artists such as Gainsborough and Hogarth.

The Old Royal Naval College is a complex of buildings that were originally built as a naval hospital in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It was designed by architect Sir Christopher Wren, who is famous for his work on St. Paul's Cathedral. The complex was later used as a training center for the Royal Navy, and it played an important role in British naval history. The Old Royal Naval College features a mix of Baroque and Palladian architecture and is considered to be one of the finest examples of Wren's work. The buildings are now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Maritime Greenwich.

Both The Queen's House and Old Royal Naval College are located in Greenwich Park, which is a large public park in London. The park is known for its stunning views of the River Thames and the city skyline. Greenwich Park is also home to the Royal Observatory, which is the site of the Prime Meridian of the world and the origin of Greenwich Mean Time.

Queens's House

Goto the Old Royal Naval College

Queen's House is a former royal residence built between 1616 and 1635 near Greenwich Palace, a few miles downriver from the City of London and now in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. It presently forms a central focus of what is now the Old Royal Naval College with a grand vista leading to the River Thames. Its architect was Inigo Jones, for whom it was a crucial early commission, for Anne of Denmark, the queen of King James VI and I. Queen's House is one of the most important buildings in British architectural history, being the first consciously classical building to have been constructed in the country. It was Jones's first major commission after returning from his 1613–1615 grand tour of Roman, Renaissance, and Palladian architecture in Italy.

Some earlier English buildings, such as Longleat and Burghley House, had made borrowings from the classical style, but these were restricted to small details not applied in a systematic way, or the building may be a mix of different styles. Furthermore, the form of these buildings was not informed by an understanding of classical precedents. Queen's House would have appeared revolutionary to English eyes in its day. Jones is credited with the introduction of Palladianism with the construction of Queen's House, although it diverges from the mathematical constraints of Palladio, and it is likely that the immediate precedent for the H-shaped plan straddling a road is the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano by Giuliano da Sangallo.

Today the building is both a Grade I listed building and a scheduled monument, a status that includes the 115-foot-wide (35 m), axial vista to the River Thames. The house now forms part of the National Maritime Museum and is used to display parts of its substantial collection of maritime paintings and portraits.

Early history

The Queen's House is located in Greenwich, London. It was built as an adjunct to the Tudor Palace of Greenwich, previously known, before its redevelopment by Henry VII as the Palace of Placentia, which was a rambling, mainly red-brick building in a more vernacular style. This would have presented a dramatic contrast of appearance to the newer, white-painted House, although the latter was much smaller and really a modern version of an older tradition of private 'garden houses', not a public building, and one used only by the queen's privileged inner circle. The original building, in fact, was intended as a pavilion with a bridge over the London-Dover road, which ran between high walls through the park of the palace.

Construction of the house began in 1616 but work on the house stopped in April 1618 when Anne became ill and died the next year. Work restarted when the house was given to the queen consort Henrietta Maria in 1629 by King Charles I, and the house was structurally complete by 1635.

However, the house's original use was short — no more than seven years — before the English Civil War began in 1642 and swept away the court culture from which it sprang. Of its interiors, three ceilings and some wall decorations survive in part, but no interior remains in its original state. This process began as early as 1662 when masons removed a niche and term figures and a chimneypiece.

Paintings commissioned by Charles I for the house from Orazio Gentileschi, but now elsewhere, include a ceiling Allegory of Peace and the Arts, now installed at Marlborough House, London, a large Finding of Moses, now on loan from a private collection to the National Gallery, London, and a matching Joseph and Potiphar's Wife still in the Royal Collection.

The Queen's House, though it was scarcely being used, provided the distant focal centre for Sir Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital, with logic and grandeur that has seemed inevitable to architectural historians but in fact depended on Mary II's insistence that the vista to the water from the Queen's House not be impaired.

Construction of the Greenwich Hospital

Although the house survived as an official building — being used for the lying-in-state of Commonwealth Generals-at-Sea Richard Dean (1653) and Robert Blake (1657) — the main palace was progressively demolished from the 1660s to 1690s and replaced by the Royal Hospital for Seamen, built 1696–1751 to the master-plan of Sir Christopher Wren. This is now called the Old Royal Naval College, after its later use from 1873 to 1998. The position of the house, and Queen Mary II's order that it retains its view of the river (only gained on the demolition of the older Palace), dictated Wren's Hospital design of two matching pairs of 'courts' separated by a grand 'visto' exactly the width of the house (115 ft). Wren's first plan, which was blocking the view to the Thames, became known to history as "Christopher Wren's faux pas". The whole ensemble at Greenwich forms an impressive architectural vista that stretches from the Thames to Greenwich Park and is one of the principal features that in 1997 led UNESCO to inscribe 'Maritime Greenwich' as a World Heritage Site.

19th-century additions

From 1806 the house itself was the centre of what, from 1892, became the Royal Hospital School for the sons of seamen. This necessitated new accommodation wings and a flanking pair to east and west were added and connected to the house by colonnades from 1807 (designed by London Dock's architect Daniel Asher Alexander), with further surviving extensions up to 1876. In 1933 the school moved to Holbrook, Suffolk. Its Greenwich buildings, including the house, were converted and restored to become the new National Maritime Museum (NMM), created by an Act of Parliament in 1934 and opened in 1937.

The grounds immediately to the north of the house were reinstated in the late 1870s following the construction of the cut-and-cover tunnel between Greenwich and Maze Hill stations. The tunnel comprised the continuation of the London and Greenwich Railway and opened in 1878.

Recent years

In 2012, the grounds to the south of the Queen's House were used to house a stadium for the equestrian events of the Olympic Games. The modern pentathlon was also staged on the grounds of Greenwich Park. The Queen's House itself was used as a VIP centre for the games. Work to prepare the Queen's House involved some internal re-modelling and work on the lead roof to prepare it for security and camera installations.

The house underwent a 14-month restoration beginning in 2015 and reopened on 11 October 2016. One controversial feature was a new ceiling in the main hall created by artist Richard Wright, a Turner prize winner. The house had previously been restored between 1986 and 1999, with contemporary insertions that modernised the building. In some quarters, it provoked some debate: an editorial in The Burlington Magazine, November 1995, alluded to "the recent transformation of the Queen's House into a theme-park interior of fake furniture and fireplaces, tatty modern plaster casts and clip-on chandeliers".

Current use

The house is now primarily used to display the Museum's substantial collection of marine paintings and portraits of the 17th to 20th centuries and for other public and private events. It is normally open to the public daily, free of charge, along with the other museum galleries and the 17th-century Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which is also part of the National Maritime Museum.

In Autumn 2022, a new painting by the artist Tilly Kettle went on permanent display. The painting depicts Sir Samuel Cornish, 1st Baronet, Richard Kempenfelt, and Thomas Parry on HMS Norfolk and was purchased by the National Maritime Museum, with assistance from the Society for Nautical Research.

Old Royal Naval College

The Old Royal Naval College is the architectural centrepiece of Maritime Greenwich, a World Heritage Site in Greenwich, London, described by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as being of "outstanding universal value" and reckoned to be the "finest and most dramatically sited architectural and landscape ensemble in the British Isles". The site is managed by the Greenwich Foundation for the Old Royal Naval College, established in 1997 to conserve the buildings and grounds and convert them into a cultural destination. The buildings were originally constructed to serve as the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich, now generally known as Greenwich Hospital, chartered by King William III and Queen Mary II on 25 October 1694, designed by Christopher Wren, and built between 1696 and 1712. The hospital closed in 1869. Between 1873 and 1998 it was the Royal Naval College, Greenwich.

Origins of the site

This was originally the site of Bella Court, built by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and subsequently renamed Palace of Placentia by Margaret of Anjou upon its confiscation. Rebuilt by Henry VII, it was thenceforth more commonly known as Greenwich Palace. As such, it was the birthplace of Tudor monarchs Henry VIII, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, and reputedly the favourite palace of Henry VIII. The palace fell into disrepair during the English Civil War. With the exception of the incomplete John Webb building, the palace was finally demolished in 1694.

Greenwich Hospital

In 1692 the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich was created on the site on the instructions of Mary II, who had been inspired by the sight of wounded sailors returning from the Battle of La Hogue. Architectural highlights included the Chapel and the Painted Hall. The Painted Hall was painted between 1707 and 1726 by Sir James Thornhill. The hospital closed in 1869 and the remains of thousands of sailors and officers were removed from the hospital site in 1875 and reinterred in East Greenwich Pleasaunce or "Pleasaunce Park".

Royal Naval College, Greenwich

In 1873, four years after the hospital closed, the buildings were converted into a training establishment for the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy finally left the College in 1998 when the site passed into the hands of the Greenwich Foundation for the Old Royal Naval College.

Greenwich Foundation for the Old Royal Naval College

Since 1998, the site has had new life breathed into it through a mix of new uses and activities and a revival of the historic old site under the management and control of the Greenwich Foundation. The buildings are Grade I listed. In 1999 some parts of Queen Mary and King William, and the whole of Queen Anne and the Dreadnought Building were leased for 150 years by the University of Greenwich. In 2000 Trinity College of Music leased the major part of King Charles. This created a unique new educational and cultural mix.

In 2002, the Foundation realised its aim of opening up the whole site to visitors. It opened the Painted Hall, the Chapel, and the grounds and a Visitor Centre to the public daily, free of charge, with guided tours available. The Old Royal Naval College became open to students and visitors of all ages and nationalities accompanied often by music wafting from Trinity College. As Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1863, "The people are sooner or later the legitimate inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens create".

In 2005, the room where Nelson's coffin was held prior to his being laid in state was opened as the Nelson Room. The little side room contains a statue of Nelson replicating the one in Trafalgar Square, memorabilia, paintings, and information. It can be seen on one of the guided tours that also include a visit to the undercrofts, the old skittle alley, and the crypt. A service is held in the chapel every Sunday at 11 am which is open to all. Public concerts are regularly held here and a wide variety of business and cultural events are held in the Painted Hall. The area is used by visitors, students, local people, and film crews in a traffic-free environment that provides a variety of coffee shops, bars, and restaurants, all incorporated within the old buildings, as part of a unique "ancient and modern" blend that support 21st-century life in Greenwich.

The Old Royal Naval College and the "Maritime Greenwich" World Heritage site are becoming focal points for a wide range of business and community activities. Trinity College of Music provides a wide range of musicians and ensembles on a subsidised commercial basis to play at events throughout East London and beyond, part of their business and community "out-reach" policy encouraged and part-funded by the Higher Education Funding Council.

The site is regularly used for filming television programmes, television advertisements, and feature films. Productions have included The Bounty, where Captain William Bligh portrayed by Anthony Hopkins is brought in a Chariot at the start of the film, and judged during subsequent scenes. Patriot Games, where an attack on a fictional royal family member, Lord Holmes, was filmed, as well as Shanghai Knights, and a 2006 television advertising campaign for the British food and clothing retailer Marks & Spencer. Other films include Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Madness of King George, The Mummy Returns, The Avengers (1998), and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001).

More recent filming has included BBC television's spy-drama Spooks and the dramatisation of Little Dorrit, David Cronenberg's film Eastern Promises, the film adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel Northern Lights and The Wolf Man (2009). The grounds were used extensively during the filming of 2006's Amazing Grace, 2011's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Now You See Me 2, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Scenes were shot at the grounds for The King's Speech, where the site doubled for Buckingham Palace, and The Dark Knight Rises, where it doubled for a cafe in the film's final scenes. In April 2012 the site was used for the iconic barricade scenes in the film adaption of the musical Les Miserables. In October 2012 the college was used for filming Thor: The Dark World. In October 2013 the college was used as a set for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Also Guy Richie's 2005 film Revolver filmed a scene there.

Painted Hall project

In 2014, the Old Royal Naval College announced that it was embarking on the next stage of its ambitious plans to restore the Painted Hall. Over three years 3,700 m2 of Thornhill's masterpiece was to be conserved. The conservation project focused on the Lower Hall (the Upper Hall having been conserved in 2013). The project included a unique series of public 'ceiling tours' allowing members of the public to get up close to the painted ceiling and see conservators at work. In March 2019, the hall reopened to the public, and the project won awards.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.