But a funny thing happened when I finally got back to my Mecca. We were standing in a snaking line to buy pastries, jostled on all sides by the Saturday afternoon crowds thronging the windowless, stuffy food hall when something snapped and I wanted out. Immediately! I could tell just by looking at the crumbling, barely frosted slices of cake they were cutting that no dessert I bought was going to taste as good as it looked, and it wasn’t worth it to me to be in that stifling atmosphere one second longer.
Here are some of the pastries we
didn’t buy…
Instead we escaped to the fourth-floor
Terrace restaurant, an airy sort of greenhouse that is possibly the only place in Harrods with windows.
© Harrods
The food was just OK, but we were cozy inside with a view of the rain soaking the Knightsbridge rooftops—I was in heaven!
Spatchcock Chicken
Fish & Chips with Mushy Peas
Fried Artichokes
On our way out, I wanted to show Patrick Harrods’ fanciful Egyptian room, which apparently so overwhelmed him that he didn’t even take a picture. Wikimedia Commons to the rescue again!
© Targeman
Right around the corner is the sort of cheesy but still touching Princess Diana memorial that Dodi Fayed’s dad installed when he was owner of Harrods. The store is now owned by the State of Qatar, and apparently there are plans to remove the memorial.
I actually saw Princess Di at a makeup counter in Harvey Nichols, a posh department store right down the street from Harrods, about a month before her death, and somehow it made the tragedy even more traumatic for me. It felt a bit ghoulish to see a lipstick-smeared glass from her last meal on display in the middle of a department store.
So on that somber note, we stumbled out of Harrods and into a taxi to… Buckingham Palace!
Right as we hopped out in front of the palace, a helicopter made a dramatic landing in the park across the street. As a dumb American, I was hoping against hope that this was the Queen returning home from Balmoral, but of course there’s no way they would have let us do a tour of her house if she was due back that day, and they certainly wouldn’t set her down on the other side of a sprawling boulevard. (Unless the pilot was an Uber driver.)
“Welp, it’s as close as I could get, Your Majesty—mind the traffic!”
Buckingham Palace was the first thing I booked for our trip. Never visiting the palace is probably my biggest regret from the time I lived in London (well, that and eating mashed potatoes for every meal…). Usually, they’re only open for tours for a couple of months in the summer, while the Queen is on vacation. But I was thrilled to discover they’d introduced an
Exclusive Evening Tour for a few weeks this past winter, and the last two days happened to coincide with the first two days of our trip! (The tour has since been extended, and it runs March 31-May 7!) The group is limited to 30 people, and you get a souvenir guide, a glass of Champagne (or cider) and a 20% discount in the gift shop. I can’t figure out if we got to see more rooms than are on the regular tour or if the “exclusive” part was that we got to go when it wasn’t summer. Either way, it was a fantastic tour!
© Royal Collection Trust —
This totally was not happening when we arrived!
First, the bad news: No photos are allowed inside. Fortunately, the souvenir guide is full of great photos, drawings and paintings, so you can just focus on seeing the rooms without a camera in front of your face.
Also, if you are a fan of
The Crown, I must warn you that the inside of the real Buckingham Palace looks nothing like the one on the show. But the place they use,
Lancaster House, is right around the corner!
There are some wonderful online resources if you want to see more of the inside of Buckingham Palace. The official website has some excellent
360-degree tours of several rooms.
Even cooler, Google Expeditions has created an amazing virtual tour of the palace interior that allows you to click around 360 degrees while the video is playing.
The Google Expedition begins in the same place we started our tour, the Marble Hall. We were introduced to a cheerful young tour guide who’d just returned from a week’s holiday at Walt Disney World! She had all the qualities you want in a guide: enthusiasm, knowledge and a strong set of pipes!
We learned that the Queen was due to return in just a few days, so things might be in a bit of disarray for our tour as the staff prepared for her arrival. (The disarray consisted primarily of a large dining table that had been moved from one room to another, and BOY did it throw our guide for a loop!) We also learned that the Queen comes in the very same entrance we did whenever she returns to Buckingham Palace, and she walks through the Marble Hall to the Grand Staircase. And that’s what makes Buckingham Palace unique: It’s one of the few
working palaces left in the world, where people actually live!
© Royal Collection Trust
Buckingham Palace came about when King George IV (whom Regency novel fans will know as “Prinny”) bought Buckingham House and set about making it into a palace with the aid of architect John Nash. But the first monarch to actually live in the palace was Queen Victoria. She had portraits of her greatest forebears hung all around the Grand Staircase to help symbolically establish her right to rule.
© Royal Collection Trust
I love this 1845 watercolor of the Grand Staircase by court artist Eugène Lami. It makes our tour group of 30 look positively dinky!
© Royal Collection Trust
Through the doors at the top of the stairs is the Guard Room, an antechamber leading to the Green Drawing Room, and inside it were my favorite pieces of art on the whole tour: life-size statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert that made you almost feel as if you’d seen them in person (albeit in an idealized,
give-Emily-Blunt-and-Rupert-Friend-a-run-for-their-money sort of way).
© Royal Collection Trust
This is the second version of the statue Prince Albert gave to Queen Victoria for her birthday in 1842. Apparently he decided the shorter kilt and bare feet on the original made it “too undressed.” It’s like a boudoir portrait in marble!
© Royal Collection Trust
The Green Drawing Room is home to a collection of rare Sèvres porcelain and some elaborate window treatments that would make Carol Burnett one heckuva Scarlett O’Hara dress!
© Royal Collection Trust
This exquisite portrait of King George III’s three youngest daughters by American artist John Singleton Copley is our guide’s favorite piece in the whole palace. Apparently it was originally criticized because, instead of prim and stately poses, the children were depicted behaving like, well, children!
© Royal Collection Trust
The Green Drawing Room opens onto the Royal Throne Room. It looks more grandiose in this photo than in person. For some reason, it didn’t feel all that imposing to me in person—maybe because of the rando dining table dumped in the middle of it!
© Royal Collection Trust
There… fixed it…
© Royal Collection Trust
The room that really took everyone’s breath away was the Picture Gallery. You round a sort of anonymous corner and then there is this HUGE long hall stretching away to infinity! For a moment you could hear nothing but a series of gasps as each cluster of tourists rounded the corner.
This photo must’ve been shot about half of the way down the hall—it runs the length of the building and is about half the length of an (American) football field. Nash placed the gallery on the first floor, in the center of the building so that it would be used as a reception hall rather than just a hushed, empty museum stuck away someplace. William and Kate’s wedding cake was displayed in this room.
© Royal Collection Trust
© Royal Collection Trust
At the end of the gallery, through the Silk Tapestry Room (three guesses what’s in there, and the first two don’t count!) is the East Gallery, home of my favorite painting in the Royal Collection.
© Royal Collection Trust
Painted by Franz Xavier Winterhalter in 1846, this portrait of the Royal Family is notable for a number of reasons: It skillfully depicts Victoria as both sovereign and mother (giving Albert a little more prominence as the traditional head of the family); it is the first royal family portrait to be almost photojournalistic, because the subjects aren’t looking directly at the viewer; and Victoria later said it was one of her three favorite portraits of Albert. But the reason I love it is… LOOK AT THAT ADORABLE BABY! She’s doing exactly what a baby would do if you were trying to get a candid photo of a family!
© Royal Collection Trust
Our next stop was The Ballroom. By this time we’d pretty much been beaten into submission by all the gilt and crystal and opulence, so we didn’t even gasp when we entered the largest room in the palace (and formerly the largest room in London!).
© Royal Collection Trust
In addition to state banquets, this room hosts about 25 investiture ceremonies per year. This is where the Queen or another member of the Royal Family bestows an honor like an Order of Merit or a knighthood on about 50 people at a time. Twenty-five ceremonies per year is like twice a month! This is when I started to realize how much work it must be to be part of the Royal Family.
If you go through the door on the right in the photo above, you get to the State Dining Room, where smaller events or things like post-dinner coffee are held. (“Smaller” events, like for 100 people!)
© Royal Collection Trust
The Blue Drawing Room is not blue. I mean, the wallpaper supposedly is, but…. come on! How hard would it be to splash a bit of blue paint around? This room served as the palace ballroom before Victoria had the big ballroom added in 1855.
© Royal Collection Trust
One of the main attractions in this room is the Table of the Grand Commanders of Antiquity, which is a sort of monument to hubris. Napoleon commissioned it right after he conquered all of Europe and crowned himself emperor. It depicts Alexander the Great and 12 other great military leaders of ancient times in porcelain and gilt-bronze. But it was not finished until 1812 (see “War of…”), and then it sat in the Sèvres factory until Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. Eventually it was given to King George IV by France’s Louis XVIII to commemorate their allied victory over Napoleon. Moral of the story: Never get involved in a land war in Asia, go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, or commission a fancy table likening yourself to great military commanders of antiquity!
© Royal Collection Trust
From there we were lead to the Music Room, where, we were told, Prince Charles’ 40th birthday party was held. Apparently Elton John and Stevie Wonder played! We also learned that the man who created the parquet floor boasted at the time, “At 50 years hence it would be good as it is now; you might drive carriages over it.” Judging by the fact that there’s a rug in this photo, I’m thinking they drove one too many carriages over it!
© Royal Collection Trust