Buckingham Palace is the official London residence of the British monarch.
The palace is a setting for state occasions and royal entertaining, and a major tourist attraction.
It has been a rallying point for the British people at times of national rejoicing and crisis.
Originally known as Buckingham House, the building which forms the core of today's palace was a large townhouse built for the Duke of Buckingham in 1703 and acquired by George III in 1761 as a private residence, known as "The Queen's House".
It was enlarged over the next 75 years, principally by architects John Nash and Edward Blore, forming three wings around a central courtyard. Buckingham Palace finally became the official royal palace of the British monarch on the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.
The last major structural additions were made in the late 19th and early 20th century, including the present-day public face of Buckingham Palace. The building is occasionally still referred to as "Buck House".
The original early 19th-century interior designs, many of which still survive, included widespread use of brightly coloured scagliola and blue and pink lapis, on the advice of Sir Charles Long.
King Edward VII oversaw a partial redecoration in a Belle epoque cream and gold colour scheme. Many smaller reception rooms are furnished in the Chinese regency style with furniture and fittings brought from the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and from Carlton House following the death of King George IV.
The Buckingham Palace Garden is the largest private garden in London, originally landscaped by Capability Brown, but redesigned by William Townsend Aiton of Kew Gardens and John Nash. The artificial lake was completed in 1828 and is supplied with water from the Serpentine, a lake in Hyde Park.
The state rooms form the nucleus of the working Palace and are used regularly by Queen Elizabeth II and members of the royal family for official and state entertaining. Buckingham Palace is one of the world's most familiar buildings and more than 50,000 people visit the palace each year as guests to banquets, lunches, dinners, receptions and the royal garden parties.
In the Middle Ages, Buckingham Palace's site formed part of the Manor of Ebury (also called Eia). The marshy ground was watered by the river Tyburn, which still flows below the courtyard and south wing of the palace.
Where the river was fordable - Cow Ford - a village, Eye Cross, grew up. Ownership of the site changed hands many times; owners included Edward the Confessor and his queen consort Edith of Wessex in late Saxon times, and, after the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror. William gave the site to Geoffrey de Mandeville, who bequeathed it to the monks of Westminster Abbey.
In 1531 Henry VIII acquired the Hospital of St James (later St. James's Palace) from Eton College, and in 1536 he took the Manor of Ebury from Westminster Abbey. These transfers brought the site of Buckingham Palace back into royal hands for the first time since William the Conqueror had given it away almost 500 years earlier.
Various owners leased it from royal landlords and the freehold was the subject of frenzied speculation in the 17th century. By then, the old village of Eye Cross had long since fallen into decay, and the area was mostly wasteland.
Needing money, James I sold off part of the Crown freehold but retained part of the site on which he established a four-acre mulberry garden for the production of silk. (This is at the northwest corner of today's palace.)
Clement Walker in Anarchia Anglicana (1649) refers to "new-erected sodoms and spintries at the Mulberry Garden at S. James's"; this suggests it may have been a place of debauchery. Eventually, in the late 17th century, the freehold was inherited from the property tycoon Sir Hugh Audley by the great heiress Mary Davies.
Possibly the first house erected within the site was that of a Sir William Blake, around 1624.
The next owner was Lord Goring, who from 1633 extended Blake's house and developed much of today's garden, then known as Goring Great Garden. He did not, however, manage to obtain freehold interest in the mulberry garden. Unbeknown to Goring, in 1640 the document "failed to pass the Great Seal before King Charles I fled London, which it needed to do for legal execution".
(It was this critical omission that helped the British royal family regain the freehold under King George III.)
The improvident Goring defaulted on his rents; Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington obtained the mansion and was occupying it, now known as Goring House, when it burned down in 1674. Arlington House rose on the site the southern wing of today's palace the next year, and its freehold was bought in 1702.
The house which forms the architectural core of the present palace was built for the first Duke of Buckingham and Normanby in 1703 to the design of William Winde. The style chosen was of a large, three-floored central block with two smaller flanking service wings.
Buckingham House was eventually sold by Buckingham's descendant, Sir Charles Sheffield, in 1761 to George III for £21,000.
(Like his grandfather, George II, George III refused to sell the mulberry garden interest, so that Sheffield had been unable to purchase the full freehold of the site.)
The house was originally intended as a private retreat for the royal family, and in particular for Queen Charlotte, and was known as The Queen's House. St. James's Palace remained the official and ceremonial royal residence; indeed, the tradition continues to the present time of foreign ambassadors being formally accredited to "the Court of St. James's", even though it is at Buckingham Palace that they present their credentials and staff to the Queen upon their appointment.
Buckingham Palace finally became the principal royal residence in 1837, on the accession of Queen Victoria. While the state rooms were a riot of gilt and colour, the necessities of the new palace were somewhat less luxurious.
For one thing, it was reported the chimneys smoked so much that the fires had to be allowed to die down, and consequently the court shivered in icy magnificence.
Ventilation was so bad that the interior smelled, and when a decision was taken to install gas lamps there was a serious worry about the build-up of gas on the lower floors.
Following the Queen's marriage in 1840, her husband, Prince Albert, concerned himself with a reorganisation of the household offices and staff, and with the design faults of the palace.
The problems were all rectified by the close of 1840.
However, the builders were to return within the decade.
By 1847, the couple had found the palace too small for court life and their growing family and, consequently, the new wing, designed by Edward Blore, was built by Thomas Cubitt, enclosing the central quadrangle. The large East Front facing The Mall is today the "public face" of Buckingham Palace and contains the balcony from which the Royal Family acknowledge the crowds on momentous occasions and annually following Trooping the Colour.
The ballroom wing and a further suite of state rooms were also built in this period, designed by Nash's student Sir James Pennethorne.
Before Prince Albert's demise, Queen Victoria was known to openly love music and dancing, and the greatest contemporary musicians entertained at Buckingham Palace.
Felix Mendelssohn is known to have played there on three occasions. Johann Strauss II and his orchestra played there when in England. Strauss's "Alice Polka" was first performed at the palace in 1849 in honour of the Queen's daughter, Princess Alice. Under Victoria, Buckingham Palace was frequently the scene of lavish costume balls, in addition to the routine royal ceremonies, investitures and presentations.
When widowed in 1861, the grief-stricken Queen withdrew from public life and left Buckingham Palace to live at Windsor Castle, Balmoral Castle, and Osborne House.
For many years the palace was seldom used, and even neglected. Eventually, public opinion forced her to return to London, though even then she preferred to live elsewhere whenever possible. Court functions were still held at Windsor Castle rather than at the palace, presided over by the sombre Queen habitually dressed in mourning black while Buckingham Palace remained shuttered for most of the year.
Directly underneath the State Apartments is a suite of slightly less grand rooms known as the semi-state apartments. Opening from the Marble Hall, these rooms are used for less formal entertaining, such as luncheon parties and private audiences.
Some of the rooms are named and decorated for particular visitors, such as the 1844 Room, which was decorated in that year for the State visit of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, and, on the other side of the Bow Room, the 1855 Room.
At the centre of this suite is the Bow Room, through which thousands of guests pass annually to the Queen's Garden Parties in the Gardens beyond. The Queen uses privately a smaller suite of rooms in the North wing.
Between 1847 and 1850, when Blore was building the new east wing, the Brighton Pavilion was once again plundered of its fittings. As a result, many of the rooms in the new wing have a distinctly oriental atmosphere.
The east front of Buckingham Palace was completed in 1850.
In 1901 the accession of Edward VII saw new life breathed into the palace.
The new King and his wife Queen Alexandra had always been at the forefront of London high society, and their friends, known as "the Marlborough House Set", were considered to be the most eminent and fashionable of the age. Buckingham Palace the Ballroom, Grand Entrance, Marble Hall, Grand Staircase, vestibules and galleries redecorated in the Belle epoque cream and gold colour scheme they retain today once again became the focal point of the British Empire and a setting for entertaining on a majestic scale.
The last major building work took place during the reign of King George V when, in 1913, Sir Aston Webb redesigned Blore's 1850 East Front to resemble in part Giacomo Leoni's Lyme Park in Cheshire.
This new, refaced principal facade (of Portland stone) was designed to be the backdrop to the Victoria Memorial, a large memorial statue of Queen Victoria, placed outside the main gates.
George V, who had succeeded Edward VII in 1910, had a more serious personality than his father; greater emphasis was now placed on official entertaining and royal duties than on lavish parties. George V's wife Queen Mary was a connoisseur of the arts, and took a keen interest in the royal collection of furniture and art, both restoring and adding to it.
Queen Mary also had many new fixtures and fittings installed, such as the pair of marble Empire-style chimneypieces by Benjamin Vulliamy, dating from 1810, which the Queen had installed in the ground floor Bow Room, the huge low room at the centre of the garden facade. Queen Mary was also responsible for the decoration of the Blue Drawing Room.
This room, 69 feet (21 m) long, previously known as the South Drawing Room, has one of Nash's finest ceilings, coffered with huge gilt console brackets.
During World War I the palace, then the home of King George V and Queen Mary, escaped unscathed.
Its more valuable contents were evacuated to Windsor but the Royal family remained in situ. The largest change to court life at this time was that the Government persuaded the King to ostentatiously and publicly lock the wine cellars and refrain from alcohol for the duration of the war, to set a good example to the supposedly inebriated lower classes.
The lower classes continued to imbibe and the King was left reputedly furious at his enforced abstinence.
The King's children were photographed at this time serving tea to wounded officers in the adjacent Royal Mews.
During World War II, the palace fared worse: it was bombed no less than seven times, and was a deliberate target, as it was thought by the Nazis that the destruction of Buckingham Palace would demoralise the nation.
The most serious and publicised bombing was the destruction of the palace chapel in 1940: coverage of this event was played in cinemas all over the UK to show the common suffering of rich and poor.
One bomb fell in the palace quadrangle while King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were in residence, and many windows were blown in and the chapel destroyed.
War time coverage of such incidents was severely restricted, however, The King and Queen were filmed inspecting their bombed home, the smiling Queen, as always, immaculately dressed in a hat and matching coat seemingly unbothered by the damage around her.
On September 15, 1940 an RAF pilot, Ray Holmes, rammed a German plane attempting to bomb the palace.
Holmes had run out of ammunition and made the quick choice to ram it. Both planes crashed and their pilots survived. This incident was captured on film.
The plane's engine was later exhibited at the Imperial War Museum in London. Following the war the British pilot became a King's Messenger. He died at the age of 90 in 2005.
On VE Day May 8, 1945, the palace was the centre of British celebrations, with the King, Queen and the Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen, and Princess Margaret appearing on the balcony, with the palace's blacked-out windows behind them, to the cheers from a vast crowd in the Mall.
Paralumun New Age Village