From ruined royal residence to magnificent modern mansion.
A 15th century gothic great hall, a stunning 20th century Art Deco entrance hall, medieval castle walls, a Renaissance-style exterior, Jazz Age interiors and high society make for a unique cocktail at Eltham Palace in southeast London.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks, please click here.
Eltham Palace traces its origins to the beginning of the 14th century as the manor of the Bishop of Durham, Anthony Beck. He gave it to King Edward II in 1305 (while Edward was still Prince of Wales) and it was a royal residence until the 16th century.
Edward IV, who used Eltham as his main country residence, built the Great Hall between 1475 and 1480. Such feasting halls were by then old-fashioned, but it lent additional status to Edward's residence and provided a venue for any large activity.
Designed by master mason Thomas Jurdan, it was modelled after Westminster Hall. This is particularly evident in its splendid hammer beam roof, designed by the king's chief carpenter Edmund Gravely. The restored Hall is the only substantial survivor of the medieval palace today.
The old palace was surrounded by fine parkland and had extensive lodgings for the royal family, a chapel, a dance hall and beautiful gardens. To the north of the moat-enclosed palace was a courtyard with lodgings for courtiers, including the Lord Chancellor.
One of Eltham's most appealing features was the fine view of London nine miles to the northwest. The brick-built rooms to the west of the hall - accommodation for the queen - included early examples of bay windows, designed to make the most of the views. The site still offers views of London today.
Henry VIII grew up at Eltham Palace in the 1490s and early 1500s. As king, he ordered new buildings at Eltham, including a new chapel, where Cardinal Wolsey took his oath on being appointed Lord Chancellor.
Henry also built new royal apartments, a tiltyard and a flushing garderobe (ie toilet or 'privy') with a lead cistern, said to be one of the first of its kind. Eltham remained a frequent venue for royal Christmas celebrations in Tudor times.
However, it fell out of favour following the rebuilding of Greenwich Palace at the turn of the 16th century, while Henry VIII also preferred Hampton Court.
Queen Elizabeth I modernised the queen's lodgings, but thereafter the palace was mainly only used for the hunting in its grounds.
The palace was surveyed towards the end of Elizabeth's reign in the late 16th century by John Thorpe, who drew plans of the site. These plans were redrawn by architect and historian WH Godfrey in 1913 for his book Some Famous Buildings and their Story, co-written with AW Clapham. The book also had photographs of Eltham, which I have reproduced in this post.
The 1913 photographs include the northern bridge over the moat and the Lord Chancellor's house (the two black and white pictures below). Both can still be seen today, although the Chancellor's house has been restored to its Tudor appearance (and is a private house).
King James I carried out work to restore and improve Eltham for use by his wife, Anne of Denmark, but she was not keen on it and preferred to live at Oatlands near Weybridge.
Charles I was the last monarch to visit Eltham. After the Civil War, during the interregnum, Parliament sold it to Colonel Nathaniel Rich. He demolished many of its buildings and took the lead from the roof of the Great Hall. After the Restoration in 1660, Charles II gave the mainly ruined palace to John Shaw, an MP and Commissioner of the Customs.
By the 18th century a farmhouse had been built against the north wall of the Great Hall, which was used as a barn (as captured in a 1793 painting by JMW Turner).
The Great Hall was saved from demolition and repaired in 1828, although it remained in use as a barn. By 1859 the farmhouse had been replaced by a grand residence, Eltham Court, which used the Hall as in indoor tennis court and for occasional parties.
In 1911 to 1914, under the direction of the Office of Works, the Great Hall's hammer beam roof timbers were reinforced with steel braces and covered with new tiles.
However, it wasn't until 1933 that Eltham Palace's revival began. That was the year Stephen Courtauld and his wife Virginia took a 99 year lease on the Eltham Palace site from the Crown Estate and began to transform it.
A member of a wealthy family of textile manufacturers, Stephen was a millionaire philanthropist, mountaineer, geographer and patron of the arts. He also helped to finance film producers Ealing Studios, where he was a member of the board. During World War I, he joined the Artists Rifles and won the Military Cross. His elder brother Samuel founded the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Virginia Courtauld (née Peirano), known as Ginie, was born in Romania to an Italian shipping merchant father and a Hungarian peasant mother and grew up in London. She and Stephen met when he was on a walking holiday in the Alps and they married in 1923. Always independent minded, the teenage Ginie had a snake tattooed on her ankle.
According to Stephen's niece Meg Bernard, "She liked to shock and she also liked to get her own way and she had enormous charm. She didn’t care what she said to anyone, or what she did.”
The Courtaulds employed architects John Seely and Paul Paget to restore the Hall to its medieval former glory and, more controversially, to build a modern mansion alongside it. It would be the project that established Seely and Paget's reputation.
Seely and Paget's design for the exterior of the house was inspired partly by Sir Christopher Wren (although it also reminds me of a French chateau).
Keen gardeners, the Courtaulds also laid out new gardens, including a rock garden, a formal rose garden, tennis courts and a swimming pool.
The interior, mainly the work of Italian designer Peter Malacrida, was strikingly Art Deco, but also with some classical and other influences also visible.
The entrance hall was by Swedish designer Rolf Engströmer. Its wall panels, veneered in Australian black bean wood, display scenes of Italy and Sweden, inspired by the Courtaulds' love of foreign travel.
The house was very modern. It had electric heaters, underfloor heating, synchronous clocks, a private telephone exchange, a centralised vacuum cleaning system, loudspeakers to play music throughout the ground floor.
The house was also a perfect place for the Courtaulds to display their art collection and to entertain their society friends and celebrity guests.
Visitors included Queen Mary, the composer Stravinsky, actress/singer Gracie Fields, conductor Malcolm Sargent, band leader Lew Stone and film producers Basil Dean and Michael Balcon, who sometimes brought newly made films with them for private viewings in the drawing room at Eltham.
Peter Malacrida decorated the drawing room in a historic style displaying Stephen's interest in ltalian art and Ginie's ltalo-Hungarian heritage.
The Conservative politician Rab Butler (who was married to Stephen Courtauld's niece, Sydney) had his own bedroom at Eltham. He stayed there for much of World War II, when he served as Minister for Education and Minister of Labour and National Service under Winston Churchill.
Husband and wife each had their own bedroom suite, with very different decorative styles. Ginie's, by Peter Malacrida, is lavishly opulent, particularly her bathroom, themed on a classical temple.
Stephen's bedroom suite, designed by architect John Seely, is plainer and more serious, although the wall includes a paper panorama of Kew Gardens and his bathroom is tiled in vivid blue and green.
Above: Kew Gardens wallpaper and Stephen's bathroom
There was even a room for Mah-Jongg ('Jonggy'), the lemur Stephen gave Ginie as a wedding present in 1923. From Jonggy's upstairs room, which was heated, there was a hatch down to the rest of the house (not always to the liking of guests, as he sometimes bit them from under the dining table).
Jonggy appears in one of the stone bosses in the restored vaulted ceiling in the north bay of the Great Hall.
The Courtaulds stayed at Eltham for most of the War, when the Great Hall was damaged by German bombing raids. They fitted out the basement as a bomb shelter, including beds for themselves and guests and a snooker room with mural paintings. Stephen even ensured the basement was gas-proof, since he was anxious to avoid a repeat of his experience of being gassed in the First World War.
However, the Courtaulds left Eltham in 1944. They had become weary with the bombs that were falling on the estate and saddened by the death on active service of a nephew, Paul, who had lived with them at Eltham and whom they saw almost as the son they never had.
They moved first to Scotland and then to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where they built another mansion, a replica French chateau called La Rochelle, and filled it with art.
They recommended that the remaining 88 years of the lease be passed to the Royal Army Educational Corps, who occupied Eltham Palace until 1992. Initially it was a school for Army officers, but in 1948 became the Institute for Army Education and the HQ Officers Mess for the Corps.
English Heritage has managed the palace since 1995, carrying out repairs and restoration work and opening the house and gardens to the public.
I visited Eltham Palace on a beautiful late summer's day last year. Captivated by its history and dazzling visual appeal, I took more than 200 photos. It's taken me almost a year to decide how to write this post and which photos to use!
Below are two more groups of photos, the first of the interior and the second of the exterior and gardens. Click on any photo to enlarge it.
I hope they encourage you to visit Eltham Palace for yourself.
For details of booking a visit to Eltham Palace, please see the English Heritage website here.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks, please click here.
Fabulous post! A perfect summary and beautiful photos of one of the finest places to visit in the UK.