Kew Palace Kitchens - Virtual Tour
Hello and welcome to Kew Palace, the home of George III, his wife Queen Charlotte and their 15 children. Historic Royal Palaces actually manage 4 buildings here at Kew Gardens. We have the Palace, the Royal Kitchens, the Great Pagoda at Kew, and also Queen Charlotte’s cottage and they’re all open from April to September but timings do vary so do check the website. Today I’m going to show you Kew Palace and the Royal Kitchens.
And here we are at the Royal Kitchens. So here we are at the great kitchen, here at Kew, everything that you can see behind me has been basically untouched since 1818 when queen Charlotte died at Kew. The ? of the kitchens just locked the door and left it completely as a time capsule to Georgian kitchens. If you over here, this table is amazing because it is the same table that was here in the 18th century when the Georgian cooks were cooking for the royal family and the knife marks that you can see on this table are the original knife marks from those Georgian chefs. Over here as well this is an amazing piece of Georgian technology, this range is powered by smoke jacks so the heat rises up, turns a motor, which then turns, as you can see, the spit so you don’t need like a boy just turning the spit all day, it just does it by itself. It’s an amazing piece of Georgian technology.
And then here, we have the charcoal range which is just like your hob at home. Charcoal would be put in these little hollows and then you have a sort of frame that stands over it that you would rest your pots on, so that’s just where you would cook your soups and your sauces just like you would at home. Let’s have a look at some of the other rooms in the kitchens, we’ll start with the silver scullery. So this is my favourite object that we have here at Kew Palace, it is a bath that was found up a chimney during the restoration of this building in 2012 and I know it doesn’t look like much at the moment, but this is fairly good evidence that this was George III bath. We know that he was prescribed daily baths, which would’ve been quite uncommon at that time, as part of his treatment for his illness and we know as well from some of the servants diaries that he used t come over to the kitchens to have his bath, rather than make the servants carry the hot water over to the palace. So we know his bath would’ve been here, it dates from the right time. We think it is his bath.
Now let’s go next door and have a look at the wet lager. So this is the wet lager which is where meat and fish would’ve be stored for the royal family. It would either be in barrels like this or on the original hooks, that you can see on the ceiling here, and this room is another piece of great Georgian engineering because of the fact that it is slightly underground and very small windows, this room never gets above 4 degrees even in a really hot sunny day and so it’s like a Georgian fridge.
And finally, let’s go have a look at the bake house. So this bake house is where bread, and dough, and pies would’ve been made and you can see that we’ve got here the original bread ovens, they sort of look like pizza ovens that you’d have today. You might notice that the table in here, which is the original table, is lower than most tables and that’s because if you’re kneading dough you want to have a really good low surface. And another thing to point out in here is that the oven here, the range, is quite up to date for a Georgian kitchen. This is actually a Victorian range and it’s because the housekeeper who was here in the 19th century looking after the palace actually used this room as her kitchen, so it was updates just very slightly for her. And I think that’s everything I’ve got to show you in the Royal Kitchens today!
Thank you so much for coming on this tour today, do check our website for opening hours for this year and we hope to see you soon.