English Country Tea Rooms

Kensington Room

	The Kensington Room is named after Kensington Palace. The Room is the smallest of the three and is decorated with floral wallpaper and burgundy carpets. This room is also available for private hire.
Kensington Palace in London is a working Royal residence. Kensington Palace was once a favoured home of some of Britain's most famous Kings and Queens. Originally a private country house, the building was acquired by William III and Mary II in the summer of 1689 and was adapted for royal residence by Sir Christopher Wren. The building was originally Nottingham House, a Jacobean mansion built about 1605. The core of old Nottingham House, which still survived at the heart of the palace, was later replaced by three new state rooms. The most striking feature of these rooms was the elaborate decorative painting of their ceilings.
When Queen Anne, who had been living at nearby Campden House, succeeded to the throne in 1702, she extended her apartments at Kensington Palace by the addition of several new rooms. Both the Queen and her husband died in Kensington Palace. The Queen died at the age of 49 on the 1st of August 1714.
	Copyright M. Cerny
George II made Kensington one of his principal residences, usually spending between four and six months of the year there. However, during his long reign very few structural alterations were made to the palace and the only new building to be erected was a stable block built in 1740 for his younger son, William, Duke of Cumberland, who lived in a house which formerly stood to the north of the palace. After the death of his wife, Queen Caroline, in 1737, large parts of the palace fell into disuse. In 1798 George III's fourth son, Edward, Duke of Kent (1767-1820), was allocated two floors of rooms in the south-east corner of the palace, beneath the State Apartments. These rooms had formerly been the king's private apartments but had been uninhabited since the death of George II in 1760, and were, therefore, in a fairly dilapidated state.
Copyright M. Cerny	The unexpected death of the Prince Regent's daughter, Princess Charlotte, in 1817 compelled the Duke to alter his plans. There was now no young heir to the throne and although George III had 12 living descendants, not one had a legitimate child. In 1818 the Duke married Victoria, the sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg - the late Princess Charlotte's husband. He returned to England when his wife was expecting their first child and on 24 May 1819 Princess Victoria was born at Kensington Palace. When Princess Victoria was only nine months old the Duke died, only a few days before the death of his father, George III, who died in January 1820.
Queen Victoria was born and brought up in the Palace and was awakened early in the morning of June 20th in 1837 with news of her accession to the throne, which was brought to her there by the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury. It had been expected that Victoria would reign from either Kensington or St James's Palace but almost immediately she moved to Buckingham Palace, with her mother, and never again stayed at Kensington. From 1867 to 1883 the Duke and Duchess of Teck (a cousin of Queen Victoria) occupied the apartments at the Palace. Their first child, Victoria Mary, was born in the palace in 1867. She later married the future King George V and as Queen, Mary took a keen interest in the arrangement of the palace after it was opened to the public in 1899. Today Kensington contains the offices and London residences of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester and The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, The Duke and Duchess of Kent and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. Kensington's best known resident in recent years was Diana, Princess of Wales (1961-97) who occupied apartments in the north-west part of the palace from 1981 to 1997.