Kew Gardens are world famous for their plant collections. But the 325-acre site also contains 40 listed buildings and two scheduled ancient monuments. The gardens are the site of three Georgian royal palaces – Richmond Lodge (demolished 1772), the White House (demolished 1802 and the target of a Time Team dig in 2002), and the Dutch House (still standing and now known as Kew Palace). Though open to visitors until the mid-1990s, Kew Palace has since been closed. Visitors, intrigued by the four-storey, gabled, redbrick house, have been left rattling on locked doors and peering through ground-floor windows. That is set to change. Thanks to a £1.6 million Heritage Lottery Fund grant, conservators are at work preparing the house for reopening in 2006. Meantime, the often inappropriate 1960s ‘restoration’ having been stripped away, the house has given up new secrets. Lee Prosser, curator at Historic Royal Palaces, tells us about the archaeology of a Georgian royal palace.
Kew Palace was built in 1631 as a riverside villa for a wealthy merchant couple of Huguenot descent, Samuel and Catherine Fortrey. After almost a century in private hands, the house was taken over by the royal family to form part of a large royal compound for much of the 18th century. It was in this building that King George III and his son George IV were educated. Later, as a private place, away from the public gaze, it was a perfect location in which to confine George III during his apparent insanity, now known to be a symptom of porphyria, an illness in which the body produces too much of the chemical porphyrin, leading to pain, cramps, hallucinations, seizures, depression, anxiety, paranoia … and the purple-red urine featured in the film The Madness of King George. Even with this distressing association, the domestic intimacy of the house and the beauty of the historic gardens were treasured by the royal family, and the Queen continued to retreat to her ‘beloved Kew’ until her death at the palace in 1818.
My interest as an archaeologist lies in the fact that a large part of the palace has remained lost in a time warp; never used, it remained unaltered and unseen for over 200 years. Furthermore, no one has ever looked closely at what survives.
