Queen's House
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The Queen's House, Greenwich, was designed and begun in 1616-1617 by architect Inigo Jones for Anne of Denmark (the queen of King James I of England) and was completed, also by Jones, about 1635 for Henrietta Maria, queen of King Charles I. The Queen's House is one of the most important buildings in British architectural history, being the first consciously classical building to have been put up in Britain. However, although its style is generally called Palladian, its most specific precedent is not by Palladio but rather Giuliano da Sangallo's Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano. Some earlier English buildings, such as Longleat, had made borrowings from the classical style; but these were restricted to small details and were not applied in a systematic way. Nor was the form of these buildings informed by an understanding of classical precedents. The Queen's House would have appeared revolutionary to English eyes in its day. It is now a grade I listed building.
The Queen's House is located in Greenwich, London, England. It was built as an adjunct to the Palace of Greenwich, previously known in Tudor times as the Palace of Placentia, which was a rambling, mainly red-brick building in a more vernacular style. This would have presented a dramatic contrast of appearance to the newer, white-painted House, although the latter was much smaller and really a modern version of an older tradition of private 'garden houses', not a public building, and one used only by the queen's privileged inner circle. However, the House's original use was short - no more than seven years - before the English Civil War began in 1642 and swept away the court culture from which it sprang.
Although the House survived as an official building - being used for the lying-in-state of Admiral Robert Blake (1657)- the main palace was progressively demolished from the 1660s to 1690s and replaced by the Greenwich Hospital for Seamen, built 1696-1752 to the master-plan of Sir Christopher Wren. This is now called the Old Royal Naval College, after its later use from 1873 to 1998. The position of the House, and Queen Mary II's order that it retain its view to the river (only gained on demolition of the older Palace), dictated Wren's Hospital design of two matching pairs of 'courts' separated by a grand 'visto' exactly the width of the House (115 feet). The whole forms an impressive architectural ensemble that stretches from the Thames to Greenwich Park and is one of the principal features that in 1997 led UNESCO to inscribe 'Maritime Greenwich' as a World Heritage Site.
From 1806 the House itself was the centre of what, from 1892, became the Royal Hospital School for the sons of seamen. This necessitated new accommodation wings, and a flanking pair to east and west were added and connected to the House by colonnades from 1807, with further surviving extensions up to 1876. In 1933 the school moved to Holbrook, Suffolk. Its Greenwich buildings, including the House, were converted and restored to become the new National Maritime Museum (NMM), created by Act of Parliament in 1934 and opened in 1937.
The House was further restored between 1986 and 1999, and it is now largely used to display the Museum's substantial collection of marine paintings and portraits (mainly of the 17th to 20th centuries) and for other public and private events. It is normally open to the public daily, free of charge, along with the other museum galleries and the 17th-century Royal Greenwich Observatory, which is also part of the NMM.
The gardens immediately to the south of the House were reinstated in the late 1870s following construction of the cut-and-cover tunnel between Greenwich and Maze Hill stations. The tunnel comprised part of the final section of the London and Greenwich Railway and opened in 1878.
The "Queen's House" was also the name used for Buckingham House, later to be rebuilt as Buckingham Palace, when it was Queen Charlotte's residence during the reign of George III.
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