Did you know that Buckingham Palace opens its doors to the public for a few weeks each year? As a self-proclaimed royal watcher and a bit of a history buff, I jumped at the chance to step inside this grand residence.
Each summer, Buckingham Palace, opens its doors for public tours while the Royal Family is away. This year’s tours will take place between July 14 through September 24 when the palace isn’t being used in its official capacity.
Of course, Buckingham Palace is pretty impressive from the outside with its golden gates and the daily pomp and circumstance of the daily Changing of the Guard. But the inside of this grand estate is spectacular and definitely worth a visit.
This summer, tourists will be able to visit even more the Palace. For the first time, public visitors will be able to see the newly renovated East Wing and step inside the room where Royal Family members get together before they go out onto the Palace balcony for events like Trooping the Colour and King Charles’ coronation last year.
(www.royal.uk)
I visited the Palace during its summer tour before the pandemic in 2019. Being inside the Palace is really awe-inspiring! Everywhere you turn, there are magnificent paintings and chandlers. There’s a museum-like quality to being inside, but it’s fun to imagine all the conversations that have taken place, the parties, and whatnot. If those walls could speak!
For the most part, the Palace offers a self-guided tour. I remember there being docents from the Royal Trust on hand to share lots of interesting tidbits about the building, its history, and the Royal Family past and present.
In addition to the new East Wing mentioned above, there are 19 amazingly appointed State Rooms that you can visit. These are used for receiving guests and official functions. Plus, don’t miss the Throne Room. You’ll recognize it immediately since it’s often used as a backdrop for royal wedding photos and was the setting for King Charles and Camila’s official Coronation portraits.
(credit: Hugo Burnand, www.royal.uk)
The White Drawing Room may just be the most beautiful of all the State Rooms. It has a spectacular crystal Chandelier. The Music Room was also magnificent and home to a grand piano that dates back to Queen Victoria’s reign. Built in 1856 by S & P Erard, its gilded, painted and varnished mahogany, satinwood and pine with brass and gilt bronze mounts. According to the Royal Collection Trust website, “The gilded case is decorated in the French early eighteenth-century style with cherubs and singeries – comical scenes involving monkeys playing musical instruments and making mischief. Queen Victoria had owned a piano decorated similarly almost twenty years earlier. In her diary of 5 March 1839, she wrote, ‘Lord Melbourne admired the new painted piano I have in the drawing-room, and said, ‘I like those monkeys on it.'”
The piano is just one of the great treasures from the Royal Collection that have been used to furnish Buckingham Palace, including paintings by master artists like Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck, sculpture by Canova and exquisite examples of Sèvres porcelain. Plus, the Palace has some of the finest English and French furniture in the world.
You can finish your tour with a visit to the Palace Garden, which is home to 30 different species of bird and over 350 different wildflowers. Visitors can walk along the south side of the garden,m and see views of the lake and the west side of the palace.
Be sure to check out the Garden Cafe, which is open to the public and overlooks the lawn where the annual Garden Parties are held (one of Queen Victoria’s contributions to the monarchy that continues to be enjoyed today), and a souvenir shop with just about everything you can imagine!
Tickets are available through the Visit London website or the Royal Collection Trust. Several tour companies also offer tours in conjunction with other activities, like an Afternoon Tea (at a restaurant nearby, not in the palace. Although that would be a tour I’d sign up for in a heartbeat, how ’bout you?!), or a tour of the Royal Mews, or some other fun London attraction.
As you can imagine, tours of Buckingham Palace are very popular and tickets sell out quickly. So be sure to book your tickets now if you’re interested.
(Disclosure: I found the ticket links online and added them to be helpful. This is not a sponsored post, and I don’t make any commission by providing them.)