Venues in Hampton Court
Hampton Court is Tudor and baroque in one building — Wolsey’s palace, Henry VIII’s Great Hall and Wren’s state apartments, in sixty acres of formal garden by the river.
/ About Hampton Court▾
Cardinal Wolsey began building at Hampton Court in the early sixteenth century and had raised the grandest house in England by the time he surrendered it to Henry VIII in 1529. The king enlarged it again: the Great Hall, finished in the 1530s, carries the last great hammerbeam roof raised in England, and the astronomical clock in Clock Court has turned since 1540. Four of Henry’s six wives lived here, and the Tudor kitchens were built to feed a court of six hundred twice a day.
The second palace is baroque. William III and Mary II commissioned Christopher Wren in 1689 to replace the Tudor state apartments, and he built the King’s and Queen’s Apartments in warm brick and Portland stone around Fountain Court, stopping short of demolishing the rest when Mary died in 1694. The result is two palaces joined down the middle, which is what makes the site unusual. The Maze was planted for William III around 1700 and is the oldest hedge maze in Britain; the Great Vine, planted by Capability Brown in 1768, is the largest in the world.
Sixty acres of formal garden surround the palace and 750 acres of Home Park run behind it, with the Thames along the front. Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity, has cared for the site since 1989 and hires its rooms and gardens for dinners and receptions. For access, Hampton Court station sits across the bridge from the gates, thirty-five minutes from Waterloo on South Western Railway, and the river itself runs up to Richmond and Kingston.