Kensington Palace

The palace began as a two-storey Jacobean mansion built by Sir George Coppin in 1605 in the village of Kensington. In the summer of 1689, shortly after William and Mary assumed the throne as joint monarchs, they bought the house, then called Nottingham House, from Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, for £20,000, to escape Whitehall Palace's fog and floods, which worsened William's asthma. They instructed Sir Christopher Wren to expand it at once; to save time and money Wren kept the existing structure and added a three-storey pavilion at each corner. The royal court took up residence shortly before Christmas 1689.

Mary extended her own rooms with the Queen's Gallery, and after a fire in 1691 the King's Staircase was rebuilt in marble. William added the South Front to a design by Nicholas Hawksmoor, including the King's Gallery. Mary died of smallpox at the palace in 1694; in 1702 William, having fallen from his horse at Hampton Court, was brought to Kensington, where he died shortly afterwards of pneumonia.

Queen Anne had Wren complete the apartments William and Mary had begun, and left her chief mark on the gardens: the Hawksmoor-designed Orangery of 1704, later modified by John Vanbrugh, and a baroque parterre laid out by the royal gardener Henry Wise.

The palace was also the setting of the final rupture between Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and the Queen, as the Duchess grew jealous of Anne's favour toward Abigail Masham. Anne's husband, Prince George of Denmark, died at Kensington in October 1708, and the two women saw each other for the last time after an argument in the Queen's Closet on 6 April 1710. Queen Anne herself died at the palace on 1 August 1714.

George I spent heavily on new state rooms (the Privy Chamber, Cupola Room and Withdrawing Room) hiring the then-unknown William Kent in 1722 to decorate them with painted trompe-l'œil ceilings and walls; between 1722 and 1727 Kent oversaw the decoration of the whole royal apartments, his final commission being the King's Grand Staircase, painted with courtiers of the Georgian court including Peter "the Wild Boy".

George II, the last reigning monarch to use Kensington Palace, made no major structural changes and left its running to his wife, Caroline of Ansbach, at whose request the royal gardener Charles Bridgeman redesigned Kensington Gardens, including the Serpentine, into a form still recognisable today. After Caroline's death George II let many rooms fall into disrepair, and he died at the palace on 25 October 1760.

During the First World War, George V allowed rooms to be used by those working for Irish prisoners of war and soldiers at the front, and required its royal inhabitants to keep to the same food rations as everyone else. So many royal relatives lived there through the 1920s and 1930s that Edward VIII nicknamed it "the aunt heap".

Kensington Palace was severely damaged in the Blitz: on 14 October 1940 an incendiary bomb exploded on the north side of Clock Court, damaging the State Apartments, particularly the Queen's Apartments, and several courtiers' grace-and-favour apartments, including those of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, and the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven. Repairs took several years; Prince Philip later stayed there with his grandmother, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, ahead of his 1947 marriage to Princess Elizabeth.

The State Rooms had opened to the public in 1899, after Queen Victoria, who was born at the palace, resisted calls to demolish the then-decaying building and Parliament funded a restoration.

From 1981 the combined Apartments 8 and 9 became the London home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana; it remained Diana's official residence after their divorce until her death on 31 August 1997, and their sons William and Harry were raised there. Her death made the palace gates a focus of public mourning, with over a million bouquets left before them; her coffin spent its last night in London at the palace before the funeral cortège left for Westminster Abbey on the morning of 6 September 1997.

The palace is Grade I listed since 1969 and also a scheduled monument, and is today managed by Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity receiving no public funding; its offices and private quarters remain the Royal Household's responsibility. Kensington Palace continues to serve as the official London residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales and several other members of the royal family.