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Soon Kensington Palace will be home to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge
Nice pad, but I bet Kate changes the wallpaper! As Kensington Palace opens to the public after a £12m makeover we take an exclusive tour of Kate and Will's new home
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The restored formal gardens: After years in the heritage doldrums, KP is finally exploiting its true potential as one of the capital's major tourist attractions
Not since the Windsor fire of 1992, has there been a royal makeover on this scale. Indeed, the last time a palace went through a facelift of this magnitude, it was courtesy of a German bomb.
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The King's Grand Staircase, The £12 million refurbishment has been paid for with cash reserves, Lottery funding and support from charitable trusts like the Clore Duffield, Gosling and Rothermere foundations
In the case of Kensington Palace, however, this £12million transformation has not been prompted by any misfortune but by years of careful planning. Admittedly, there has been one unexpected, 11th-hour alteration to the designs.
But no one is complaining about the decision of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to set up home here — because their presence in the private wing of the palace is only going to draw even more visitors through the doors on the public side.
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An aerial view of the Kensington Palace which used to be the Royal seat
of power until the monarchy moved to Buckingham Palace
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The Historic Royal Palaces team believe Kensington Palace has to appeal to all ages and tastes
if it is to boost its annual visitor numbers from the usual 300,000 to upwards of 400,000
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First opened to tourists in Victorian times, Kensington Palace has long been a collection of flats for royal relatives - the Duke of Windsor used to call it 'the Aunt Heap'
‘We’ve set out to awaken a sleeping beauty,’ announced Charles Mackay, the chairman of Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity which runs the place. He might equally have called it a sleeping giant. Because, after years in the heritage doldrums, KP is finally exploiting its true potential as one of the capital’s major tourist attractions.
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The statue of Queen Victoria sculpted by her daughter Princess
Louise has been spruced up and is looking as good as new
Robert Hardman stands by the modern luminous lace piece - a light sculpture
made of more than two miles of electroluminescent wire
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