Millions of people pass Kensington Palace, but very few go in. The palace appears inaccessible, unwelcoming and intimidating. Locals, particularly those who are disadvantaged, tend not to visit. Up until now, the palace has attracted about 250,000 visitors a year.
They’ve been treated to a traditional visitor experience. But Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), which has responsibility for the palace, says that despite having been “the setting for some of the most important events in our nation’s history, Kensington Palace’s stories – which belong to the nation, and have shaped the way we live today – remain hidden”.
Kensington Palace used to be central to the kingdom’s life and government. It hosted the courts of William and Mary, Queen Anne, George I and George II; it was Queen Victoria’s birthplace and childhood home.
It still provides private residences for various royals and members of the Queen and Prince Charles’s retinues. But it’s probably best known as having been home to Diana, Princess of Wales. The image that persists in the public memory is that of the flowers piled high at its gate after she died in 1997.
The palace also holds the royal ceremonial dress collection, a unique archive of 12,000 items of royal apparel from the 18th century onwards. Recent exhibitions include Diana, Fashion and Style (1 April 2009-31 January 2010), which celebrated the princess’s inimitable style, and the Last Debutantes (11 June 2008-1 January 2010), which featured dresses worn by debs during the final 1958 season.
But however much magnetism Diana still exerts, it isn’t sufficient to bring Kensington Palace into the 21st century. HRP acknowledges that the social history of the highest echelons of society, as represented by “the fossilised archaic uniforms of the British court”, needs more radical treatment than it has had to date.
HRP’s mission is to help everyone explore the story of how monarchs and people have shaped society. And since it receives no funding from either government or the Crown, and depends on the support of its visitors, members, donors, volunteers and sponsors, it aims to engage the widest possible audience.
It hopes to double visitor figures within five years, and quadruple the number of children participating in its education programmes.
New narratives
These ambitions are far from immodest given the profile of the palace’s audiences and the fact that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has above average levels of deprivation alongside the highest proportion of residents earning over £60,000 in London.
HRP proposals are to increase its community, exhibition and education spaces, create new gardens, courtyards and public areas and redisplay Victoria’s childhood rooms. Its aim is to transform the visitor experience though imaginative displays of Kensington’s collections.
The palace is currently undergoing a £12m renovation, which started in March 2010 for completion in June 2012.
While much of the palace Is closed, HRP has mounted the Enchanted Palace, a two-year installation. This is not only intended to maintain Kensington’s visibility, but to pilot its planned use of “innovative storytelling techniques and technologies”.
Visitors are promised a magical experience, in which performance and dreamlike installations are woven together: contemporary fashion collides with the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection; fantasies spin out of the palace’s real stories.
It’s often claimed that contemporary art can be used to shed a light on history. If nothing else, the Enchanted Palace puts that to the test.
A series of British-based designers (Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest, Stephen Jones, Boudicca, Aminaka Wilmont and Echo Morgan), working with Wildworks, a theatre company that produces “unique landscape theatre in challenging places”, have created tableaux in rooms where original presences are evoked by paintings, furniture and objects from the collection.
Visitors are invited to explore the apartments on a “quest” for the seven princesses who once lived in the palace and whose lives are re-imagined in the installations.
The palace’s stories, as told here, are often about potential and the illusion of power contrasted with personal sadness and constraint (“Be careful what you wish for”).
These themes are illustrated by the rebellious princess who ran from an arranged marriage into the arms of love; queens who bore the pain and loss of their babies; the young heir to the throne who escaped the grasp of an overprotective mother; Peter, a feral boy, who was kept as a pet, and so on.
Historical evocations
The route, which starts, conspiratorially, with visitors “sneaking up the wrong stairs”, takes you through the Room of Beginnings through the Room of Royal Sorrows; and via rooms of Enlightenment, Flight, Royal Secrets, Lost Childhood, Fish and Beer; and Dancing Shadows among others.
Visitors are supposed to give themselves up to the experience and “use their eyes and ears to find clues that reveal the identity of the elusive royal residents”. That is more easily said than done.
The Enchanted Palace mainstreams a genre of site-specific work that has been around since the mid-1990s, if not earlier. But the palace’s visitors may not be familiar with work that plays on unfamiliar presences, historical evocations and deliberate ambiguities.
Don’t expect to see the joyous Diana, wearing the dress in which she danced with John Travolta, represented in the Room of Dancing Princesses. This presentation emphasises her victimhood, evoking her presence in a ghostly white dress by Bruce Oldfield. Alongside Princess Margaret, she is depicted as having “danced into the dark… each in her own way escaping”.
Private histories
There’s a fine line between visitors suspending their disbelief throughout the passage of the 15 rooms, and maintaining a sense of the historic narrative. Support and encouragement is provided by an “enchanted map”, so you can locate yourself in the maze of disorientating rooms, and a deliberately ambiguous guide to get you going: “Why is this princess weeping?
"The pressure to produce an heir shaped the lives of many of Kensington’s princesses. This princess had no children. When was the last time you cried?” Obliging palace guardians are also available to provide “personal insights into the strange world of the palace”.
The quality of the interpretations is enormously variable. The guides and front-of-house staff were fantastically knowledgeable; the poetic narratives (placed on lecterns and readable by one visitor at a time) were effectively inaccessible, and the actors (identifiable by torches strapped to on their heads) were downright intrusive: “Is this your slipper? Does it fit? Might you really be a princess?”
The quality of the installations was similarly unpredictable. They ranged from the impenetrable to the evocative; from the opaque to the transparent. Wilmont’s bottles of tears; Morgan’s cabinet of curiosities; Boudicca’s Room of Palace Time; the Rooms of a Sleeping Princess and of Lost Childhood; the hunted animals in the Room of Royal Secrets and the Galley of War and Play are among the best – beautiful and memorable. Other installations are tacky and uninteresting.
The Enchanted Palace inevitably raises questions about the kind of history that Kensington is currently promoting. At its best, it draws on feminist historians’ work on the hidden histories of women, the “private” worlds of family connections and friendship networks, and women’s place within broader political culture. At its worst, it falls into the trap of what historian David Starkey recently and scathingly referred to as “historical Mills & Boon”.
Sara Selwood is an independent museum consultant
Cost £332,000
Funder Historic Royal Palaces
Designers Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest, Stephen Jones, Boudicca, Aminaka Wilmont, Wildworks
Illustrator/set designer Echo Morgan
Visuals/multimedia Wildworks
Exhibition ends January 2012
They’ve been treated to a traditional visitor experience. But Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), which has responsibility for the palace, says that despite having been “the setting for some of the most important events in our nation’s history, Kensington Palace’s stories – which belong to the nation, and have shaped the way we live today – remain hidden”.
Kensington Palace used to be central to the kingdom’s life and government. It hosted the courts of William and Mary, Queen Anne, George I and George II; it was Queen Victoria’s birthplace and childhood home.
It still provides private residences for various royals and members of the Queen and Prince Charles’s retinues. But it’s probably best known as having been home to Diana, Princess of Wales. The image that persists in the public memory is that of the flowers piled high at its gate after she died in 1997.
The palace also holds the royal ceremonial dress collection, a unique archive of 12,000 items of royal apparel from the 18th century onwards. Recent exhibitions include Diana, Fashion and Style (1 April 2009-31 January 2010), which celebrated the princess’s inimitable style, and the Last Debutantes (11 June 2008-1 January 2010), which featured dresses worn by debs during the final 1958 season.
But however much magnetism Diana still exerts, it isn’t sufficient to bring Kensington Palace into the 21st century. HRP acknowledges that the social history of the highest echelons of society, as represented by “the fossilised archaic uniforms of the British court”, needs more radical treatment than it has had to date.
HRP’s mission is to help everyone explore the story of how monarchs and people have shaped society. And since it receives no funding from either government or the Crown, and depends on the support of its visitors, members, donors, volunteers and sponsors, it aims to engage the widest possible audience.
It hopes to double visitor figures within five years, and quadruple the number of children participating in its education programmes.
New narratives
These ambitions are far from immodest given the profile of the palace’s audiences and the fact that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has above average levels of deprivation alongside the highest proportion of residents earning over £60,000 in London.
HRP proposals are to increase its community, exhibition and education spaces, create new gardens, courtyards and public areas and redisplay Victoria’s childhood rooms. Its aim is to transform the visitor experience though imaginative displays of Kensington’s collections.
The palace is currently undergoing a £12m renovation, which started in March 2010 for completion in June 2012.
While much of the palace Is closed, HRP has mounted the Enchanted Palace, a two-year installation. This is not only intended to maintain Kensington’s visibility, but to pilot its planned use of “innovative storytelling techniques and technologies”.
Visitors are promised a magical experience, in which performance and dreamlike installations are woven together: contemporary fashion collides with the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection; fantasies spin out of the palace’s real stories.
It’s often claimed that contemporary art can be used to shed a light on history. If nothing else, the Enchanted Palace puts that to the test.
A series of British-based designers (Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest, Stephen Jones, Boudicca, Aminaka Wilmont and Echo Morgan), working with Wildworks, a theatre company that produces “unique landscape theatre in challenging places”, have created tableaux in rooms where original presences are evoked by paintings, furniture and objects from the collection.
Visitors are invited to explore the apartments on a “quest” for the seven princesses who once lived in the palace and whose lives are re-imagined in the installations.
The palace’s stories, as told here, are often about potential and the illusion of power contrasted with personal sadness and constraint (“Be careful what you wish for”).
These themes are illustrated by the rebellious princess who ran from an arranged marriage into the arms of love; queens who bore the pain and loss of their babies; the young heir to the throne who escaped the grasp of an overprotective mother; Peter, a feral boy, who was kept as a pet, and so on.
Historical evocations
The route, which starts, conspiratorially, with visitors “sneaking up the wrong stairs”, takes you through the Room of Beginnings through the Room of Royal Sorrows; and via rooms of Enlightenment, Flight, Royal Secrets, Lost Childhood, Fish and Beer; and Dancing Shadows among others.
Visitors are supposed to give themselves up to the experience and “use their eyes and ears to find clues that reveal the identity of the elusive royal residents”. That is more easily said than done.
The Enchanted Palace mainstreams a genre of site-specific work that has been around since the mid-1990s, if not earlier. But the palace’s visitors may not be familiar with work that plays on unfamiliar presences, historical evocations and deliberate ambiguities.
Don’t expect to see the joyous Diana, wearing the dress in which she danced with John Travolta, represented in the Room of Dancing Princesses. This presentation emphasises her victimhood, evoking her presence in a ghostly white dress by Bruce Oldfield. Alongside Princess Margaret, she is depicted as having “danced into the dark… each in her own way escaping”.
Private histories
There’s a fine line between visitors suspending their disbelief throughout the passage of the 15 rooms, and maintaining a sense of the historic narrative. Support and encouragement is provided by an “enchanted map”, so you can locate yourself in the maze of disorientating rooms, and a deliberately ambiguous guide to get you going: “Why is this princess weeping?
"The pressure to produce an heir shaped the lives of many of Kensington’s princesses. This princess had no children. When was the last time you cried?” Obliging palace guardians are also available to provide “personal insights into the strange world of the palace”.
The quality of the interpretations is enormously variable. The guides and front-of-house staff were fantastically knowledgeable; the poetic narratives (placed on lecterns and readable by one visitor at a time) were effectively inaccessible, and the actors (identifiable by torches strapped to on their heads) were downright intrusive: “Is this your slipper? Does it fit? Might you really be a princess?”
The quality of the installations was similarly unpredictable. They ranged from the impenetrable to the evocative; from the opaque to the transparent. Wilmont’s bottles of tears; Morgan’s cabinet of curiosities; Boudicca’s Room of Palace Time; the Rooms of a Sleeping Princess and of Lost Childhood; the hunted animals in the Room of Royal Secrets and the Galley of War and Play are among the best – beautiful and memorable. Other installations are tacky and uninteresting.
The Enchanted Palace inevitably raises questions about the kind of history that Kensington is currently promoting. At its best, it draws on feminist historians’ work on the hidden histories of women, the “private” worlds of family connections and friendship networks, and women’s place within broader political culture. At its worst, it falls into the trap of what historian David Starkey recently and scathingly referred to as “historical Mills & Boon”.
Sara Selwood is an independent museum consultant
Project data
Cost £332,000
Funder Historic Royal Palaces
Designers Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest, Stephen Jones, Boudicca, Aminaka Wilmont, Wildworks
Illustrator/set designer Echo Morgan
Visuals/multimedia Wildworks
Exhibition ends January 2012
