Five of HRP's six royal palaces are in London. It costs £120 to visit them all.
Tower of London £37.00
Hampton Court Palace £29.00
Kensington Palace £19.00
Banqueting House £10.00
Kew Palace £25.00 TOTAL £120.00
Take up HRP membership and you can get that down to £89.
But by playing the long game I've managed to visit the lot for less than £20.
I saved the most expensive until last.
Tower of London £1.00
Hampton Court Palace £7.75
Kensington Palace £0.00
Banqueting House £0.00
Kew Palace £10.00 TOTAL £18.75
Tower of London: £37 is pretty steep for a palace visit, even when it's an extra-special Norman fortress, and even more so if you stump up the cheeky £3.70 donation on top. But Tower Hamlets residents get to visit the Tower for £1 which is easily one of London's best deals, an offer I've taken up several times (2005/2009/2015/2023). Hampton Court Palace: Visiting Hampton Court is never cheap, but sometimes they do a half-price offer in the winter months and in 2015 I got the usual £15.50 down to £7.75. The price has almost doubled since. Kensington Palace: In 2019 I had an Art Pass when that entitled you to free entry. These days it only entitles you to half-price entry when there's a temporary exhibition open. Banqueting House: For Open House in 2003 they let us in for nothing (and gave us a damned good eight page booklet too). Kew Palace: This is the odd one out because you can't just go in, you have to buy a ticket for Kew Gardens where it's one of the attractions within. And Kew Gardens isn't cheap, it's currently £25 a shot, and although that drops to £17 in winter Kew Palace only opens April to September. But for the rest of 2026 there's a special offer whereby admission is ONLY £10 EVERY TUESDAY and that is a bargain. Alas I got in on the last possible Kew Palace Tuesday so you can't follow me in.
Historic Royal Palaces:Kew Palace Location: Kew Gardens, TW9 3AB [map] Open: 11am-4pm (April - September) Admission: as part of admission to Kew Gardens Website:hrp.org.uk/kew-palace Five word summary: the madhouse of King George Time to allow: about an hour photos:eight
When the Georges were on the throne, Kew was a much more important royal home. George II's eldest son Frederick enlarged an existing home into The White House, long demolished, then added a separate kitchen block behind to reduce the risk of fire. His children were educated in The Dutch House alongside, amongst them the future George III (and later his son George IV). This took on a greater significance when George III was confined here during his third and final mental health trauma, lured inside on a pretext then confined to the ground floor with his doctors. His wife Queen Charlotte moved in upstairs, also four of his 15 children, the princesses Augusta, Amelia, Elizabeth and Sophie. The Queen predeceased her husband, after which Kew was never again used by royalty, but Queen Victoria opened it to the public in 1898 and that is a ridiculously potted history of Kew Palace.
The palace is on the far side of the park where you might never notice it, although if you do drop into the Orangery for spinach curry the bright citrus of its distant facade might just attract your attention. It screams Dutch even from a distance, the rounded gables, the symmetry and even more the orange. Expect to be greeted at the door by staff in costume, perhaps a little tired of offering the same welcome and mini-safety briefing over and over again all summer. What you're getting for your 'no additional charge' is a walk round up-to-three of the floors, starting with a circuit of downstairs in the King's Library. A teensy scrap of 17th century decoration has been revealed on one wall, a human figure no larger than A4 size, which was revealed only after painstaking peeling. It's believed the pattern continues across the room so they'd love to uncover more, but it's underneath 37 subsequent layers of wallpaper and nobody has either the time or the money to remove the lot.
The King's Dining Room is where George III was served what his doctors told him to eat, like asparagus for his bowels and jellies to ease his stomach pains. The information boards are keen to point out that we shouldn't judge the man solely on health issues later in his 59-year reign, but unfortunately that's the era focused on here. Another room has mannequins representing the royal couple and their 15 children, sheesh, it seems poor Queen Charlotte did nothing much for two decades but be pregnant. Her suite of rooms is upstairs, starting with the boudoir where sewing, spinning and embroidery fended off the boredom of waiting for her husband to get better. The drawing room is nationally significant because it's here that two of the princes had emergency weddings to German princesses after George III's only grandchild died in childbirth. Edward's marriage lasted only two years before he too died, but that was long enough for Princess Victoria to be born and she'd go on to rule even longer than her grandfather.
Look they've stripped back one of the walls so you can see the original oak blocks used for construction in the 1630s. Look it's the chair Queen Charlotte died in, indeed never left for the last few months of her life, a comfy lowslung black number that apparently nobody's sat in since. Look the stairs to the second floor have been blocked off, this because it's nearly the end of the season and they just don't have the staff. And look there's a couple in full Indian dress dancing at the bottom of the garden, being filmed by two blokes from Eminence Cinema. It's a pleasantly compact garden, one half formal and Georgian, the other half sunken and Stuart, although a tower block across the Thames in Brentford spoils the skyline somewhat. And that's not all.
You could easily miss the small sign by some woodland inviting you to visit the palace kitchens but that would be a shame. At the far end is a well-tended kitchen garden and the offer of a half-hourly tour of the basement, which you should definitely take up. Here food was prepared for the White House and the Palace, so you get to go into the wet store (with actual meathooks), bakery (with actual ovens) and main kitchen (with actual table gouged by 18th century knife marks). The best part may be the huge fireplace where roasting meat was rotated automatically via a devious heat-powered spit, but is more likely the tin bath George III sat in while he endured hours of heat- or ice-treatment, this found stuffed up a chimney when the kitchens were restored in 2012.
You'd probably be happy to pay £10 for the combined attraction of a palace and a kitchen tour, so how brilliant that it's merely an add-on to all the other glories at Kew Gardens. Until Sunday.
