London: Nov 7: Hampton Court Palace

On Sunday, November 7, 2010, I left the house early to spend the day exploring Hampton Court Palace. With a high of 9 degrees C / upper-40s F, it was the first cold day on my trip to London. I dressed warmly.

I took pictures on this outing.

I had thought I'd get to the palace, which is substantially southwest of London, by a straight-forward, long tube ride to Waterloo station followed by an overground ride. I was wrong. My nearby tube line was shut for repairs. Instead, I took a rail-replacement bus to a different tube line to another tube line to Wimbledon station (passing in the process the station near where I lived the previous summer) to catch midway the train that travels from Waterloo to Hampton Court Palace. Despite the crazy route, the journey took about the same length of time (about an hour and forty-five minutes) as it would have if everything were running.

The palace is large, with probably several hundred rooms, though only certain wings are on display. It was originally built by Cardinal Wolsey; desired, annexed, and expanded by King Henry VIII (in the Tudor style); and further expanded by William (III) & Mary (in the Baroque style). Other Kings and Queens resided there as well, though none built as much as those three residents.

There are many commonalities between these palace wings. There are tapestries everywhere, lots of stained glass, many paintings (especially of themselves and other royals), and a good number of huge murals (on walls and ceilings). Lots of the non-portrait images allude to religious events or renowned rulers (e.g., Augustus) -- basically imagery that reflects the royals' divine right to rule or reflecting their intentions for empire.

Exploring the palace and listening to the audio guides taught me a lot about the history of the English throne around this time. That said, I generally didn't like the audio guides. (Yes, I say guides because there were different ones for different sections of the palace.) Half were conversational, often with play acting, but consequently were frustratingly slow, with low information density. (They had a good amount of info, just presented slowly.) Another was simply boring. Only one (on King William's apartments) was good, explaining not just furniture and decorations but also people's behaviors, personalities, and the public opinion on the monarch at various times. Because I felt I got enough history of the palace from my guidebooks and audio guides, I skipped the "Story of the Palace" exhibit.

Some little touches made the palace fun. For example, the palace has hidden speakers playing sounds: horses clip-clopping in a courtyard, meat getting chopped in a kitchen, a ghostly voice in an allegedly haunted corridor. They did similar things with smells, such as fish and meat in different places in the kitchen. There were also some people in costume who gave educational historic talks or put on shows, speaking in appropriate Middle English. Also, the kitchen had "experimental food historians." These people were actively using the Tudor-era kitchen and experimenting with medieval cooking techniques to figure out what people in the time actually did.

Indeed, in the gift shop attached to the kitchen exhibit (as opposed to the gift shop for the palace as a whole), I found many books about the history of English cooking, including The Taste of the Fire: the story of the Tudor Kitchens at Hampton Court Palace (which has old Tudor middle-English recipes along with their translations into modern English), Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking, Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef, and The Last Food of England (describing what traditional foods have managed to survive into the supermarket age and what have not).

While at the palace, I tried the famous hedge maze (some say the most famous in the world). It's actually the only part of the Wilderness Garden that remains in its original state; the rest previously contained other mazes and secret walks. Now it's merely a pleasant park.

The maze is small; I have a good sense of direction; and I found my way to the center in five minutes. (Really!) There aren't actually many dead ends, though there is a lot of splitting and rejoining paths, so if you have a good model you can know pretty well what paths are fruitful or not.

I didn't have time to visit everything before everything closed. I skipped most outdoor gardens; I spent most of my time in the palace rather than the grounds because I know I can come back to the gardens/grounds for free, but didn't want to have to the pay the hefty entrance fee to visit the palace again. Also, I didn't get to see the Royal Chapel because it is closed to tourists on Sundays. I didn't even get to see everything in the palace; I ran out of time before seeing the display of The Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna (but I don't mind missing this).

Some things I learned over the course of my visit:

• In King Henry VIII's time, 600 courtiers lived in the palace. Each was entitled to two meals a day. That's a lot of meals! Two hundred or so people worked in the kitchen to support the courtiers and royalty.
• Courtiers ate 4,500 to 5,000 calories a day. They must work hard!
• Each year, the palace ate through 600,000 gallons of beer, 200 barrels of wine, 1,200 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 2,300 deer, and 1,800 pigs, as well other animals. (There were people who kept track of inflows and outflows and managed the supply chain.) Can you tell I spent a lot of time in the kitchen section of the palace?
• The royalty couldn't live in the palace year-round because it drew too many resources from the surrounding countryside. It wasn't sustainable.
• Some think King Henry VIII's diet was 70% meat.

Anyway, come time to leave, I began my long trek home, taking a simpler route back (though not as simple as it would've been if everything had been running).