The Queen's House and the Tulip Stairs
Why is it significant?
In front of you stands a crisp white villa, almost a perfect box, with long rows of windows and a balcony on the first floor. After the rambling Tudor brick palaces, this was something England had never seen: a house designed by strict classical proportion, the first of its kind in the country.
Key Facts
| Place | The Queen's House and the Tulip Stairs |
|---|---|
| Address | Romney Road, London SE10 9NF, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.48120, -0.00390 |
| Part of Walk | Under the Thames to Longitude Zero: Maritime Greenwich, London |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you stands a crisp white villa, almost a perfect box, with long rows of windows and a balcony on the first floor. After the rambling Tudor brick palaces, this was something England had never seen: a house designed by strict classical proportion, the first of its kind in the country.
Its architect, Inigo Jones, had walked among the ruins of Rome and studied Palladio's villas in Italy. He began the house in 1616 for Anne of Denmark, the wife of King James the First. Legend says James gave her Greenwich as an apology, after he swore at her in public because she had accidentally shot his favourite hound while hunting. Anne died in 1619 with the house unfinished, and building stopped. It was completed in the 1630s for another queen, Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles the First, who called it her house of delight.
Strangely, it was built straddling the main road from Deptford to Woolwich, which ran right through it. The house began as two blocks joined by a bridge over the road, so that the queen could pass from the palace gardens into the park without ever touching the mud. The long colonnades beside it, added in the early nineteenth century, still follow the line of that vanished road. Inside, the great hall is a perfect cube, and to one side curls the Tulip Stairs, the first geometric self-supporting spiral staircase in Britain.
And those stairs come with a ghost story. In 1966 a retired clergyman from Canada, the Reverend Ralph Hardy, photographed the empty staircase. When the film was developed, it seemed to show one or two shrouded figures gripping the rail and climbing. The story goes that experts checked the negative and found no sign of tampering. Treat it as a legend... but many visitors linger on those steps longer than they planned.
Today the house is an art gallery for the maritime collection, and its star is the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth the First, her hand resting on a globe while the Spanish fleet is wrecked behind her. Now walk west along the colonnade to the large museum next door, where the treasures of Britain's seafaring past are kept.