English Heritage Guidebooks
2 total works
The private home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was more than just a refuge from court life: it gave the couple the chance to indulge their interests and express their tastes. It is truly their creation, from the replica Swiss Cottage where the children learnt housekeeping and gardening to the extraordinary Durbar Room, a tribute to the Queen's love of India. This new guidebook includes a tour and history of the house, with reconstruction drawings and historical photographs.
From the 14th to the 16th centuries, Eltham was an important royal palace - a favoured residence where successive monarchs spent Christmas and hunted in the surrounding parks. Edward IV built the magnificent great hall, with its soaring hammerbeam roof and bay windows. In 1933 the site was leased to Stephen Courtauld, who constructed a modern house incorporating the great hall. The house was lavishly decorated in a variety of styles, reflecting the influence of Art Deco and contemporary ocean liners, as well as incorporating historical and classical motifs. This guide does full justice to the medieval remains, the remarkable Courtauld interiors and the delightful gardens, also laid out in the 1930s, and sheds light on the Courtaulds' glamorous, if brief, occupation of Eltham.