Kensington Palace: Where Victoria Was Born

Why is it significant?

Stand on the Broad Walk facing the red-brick palace, and find the white marble queen on her plinth in front of it. She is young, crowned, holding a sceptre... and she was carved by her own daughter, Princess Louise, who unveiled the statue in 1893.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on the Broad Walk facing the red-brick palace, and find the white marble queen on her plinth in front of it. She is young, crowned, holding a sceptre... and she was carved by her own daughter, Princess Louise, who unveiled the statue in 1893. A mother sculpted by her child, at the door of the house where the mother was born.

Victoria came into the world inside these walls on 24 May 1819, fifth in line to the throne and not expected to matter very much. Her childhood was run on what came to be called the Kensington System, devised by her mother's ambitious adviser, John Conroy. She slept in her mother's bedroom, was almost never alone, and was not even allowed to walk down the stairs without someone holding her hand. The palace had been a royal home since 1689, when William III and Mary II bought a Jacobean mansion here and had Christopher Wren enlarge it, partly because the damp riverside air of Whitehall was bad for the king's asthma.

Then, at six in the morning on 20 June 1837, her mother woke her. Waiting downstairs were the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain, who had come through the night from Windsor. Her uncle, William IV, was dead. She received them alone, in her dressing gown, eighteen years old and Queen. Within weeks she had moved to Buckingham Palace and, for the first time in her life, into a bedroom of her own.

Two years later her German cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, came to visit, and she fell hard. Because she was the sovereign, she had to do the proposing herself, which she did at Windsor in October 1839. Albert turned out to be one of the most restless minds of his century, a prince obsessed with science, industry and education... and the walk ahead of you is, in a sense, his brain laid out in brick and terracotta.

The palace has gone on collecting royal stories. Princess Margaret lived here, and so did Diana, Princess of Wales; in 2021 her sons unveiled a statue of her in the Sunken Garden on the far side of the building. But today belongs to Albert. Turn your back on the palace and head east across the open grass, towards a great bronze horseman rearing up under the trees.