Eltham Palace

The problem with Eltham Palace is where to start. The building has two completely distinct and equally remarkable things happening under one roof, separated by approximately 450 years, and both are specific and checkable in ways that most heritage attractions are not. Starting with the medieval side is logical chronologically. Starting with the lemur is probably more effective.

Mah-Jongg was a ring-tailed lemur. Stephen and Virginia Courtauld, who leased the ruins of Eltham Palace from the Crown in 1931 and built a luxury Art Deco mansion directly alongside the medieval Great Hall, kept him as a pet. When they commissioned Seely and Paget to design the new house in 1933, the brief included accommodating Mah-Jongg. The architects responded with heated quarters specifically designed for a lemur: temperature-controlled, with a spiral staircase connecting to the outdoor gardens, positioned so that Mah-Jongg could move between his private suite and the house's communal spaces in a way that suited his behavioural requirements. This is architectural history that the standard survey texts do not typically cover, but it is documented in the building record and is visible in the surviving structure: a room designed for a lemur, built in 1936, in a mansion that sits directly adjacent to a 15th-century Great Hall.

The Great Hall is the other remarkable thing. Completed around 1480 under Edward IV — the Yorkist king who used Eltham as a major royal residence and invested significantly in its buildings — the hall has a hammerbeam roof that is among the finest surviving examples of late medieval English carpentry. Hammerbeam roofs are a specifically English medieval structural form: rather than a simple pitched roof on vertical walls, the hammerbeam system uses a series of horizontal timber brackets projecting from the wall-heads, each carrying a vertical post that supports the next tier, creating a structural vault of timber that achieves much greater spans than simple roof trusses can manage. Westminster Hall (completed 1399) has the largest surviving hammerbeam roof in England; Christ Church Great Hall in Oxford has the second-largest. Eltham's Great Hall roof is third. The hierarchy matters because it establishes the scale of royal investment the 1480s building represented: Eltham was not a minor royal property but a major residence where kings held court and large-scale assembly was regular.

The medieval history of Eltham makes this clear. The site was acquired by the crown in the early 14th century from Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham. Henry IV — the first Lancastrian king, who spent significant time at Eltham during his reign from 1399 to 1413 — used it as one of his principal residences. Henry V held Eltham court as well. Henry VI was here. The young Henry VIII, before his accession in 1509, was raised partly at Eltham; his children's households were maintained here, and the palace appears in the records of his early years in a way that gives the site a specific claim on Tudor history. After Henry VIII moved his principal south London base to Greenwich Palace, Eltham declined gradually in royal favour and was eventually left to fall into ruin — which is what the Courtaulds found when they arrived in 1931.

The Courtauld family's involvement requires brief context. Stephen Courtauld was a member of the same family that founded the Courtauld textile business, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Courtauld Gallery. They were wealthy in the way that early 20th-century industrial families were wealthy when the industrial money was managed with intelligence across generations, and they spent the money in the way that cultivated wealthy people spent it in interwar Britain: collecting art, supporting cultural institutions, and commissioning ambitious buildings. The decision to lease Eltham and build a house there rather than purchase a conventional country estate was characteristic of Virginia Courtauld's specific aesthetic interests: she wanted something that combined modern comfort with historical resonance, and the ruins of a royal palace in southeast London provided both.

The house they built is, by any measure, extraordinary. The Art Deco interiors designed by Renzo Mongiardino and other Italian decorators include a series of rooms each in a different idiom: Virginia's circular bedroom with a domed ceiling in Venetian gold-leaf decoration, Stephen's quieter study, a dining room with a marquetry frieze depicting Australian wildlife (including kangaroos, platypuses, and birds of paradise), a gold-tiled bathroom, and — back to Mah-Jongg — a specialist room for a ring-tailed lemur with its own climate control. The Courtaulds also installed central heating throughout (unusual in British domestic buildings of 1936), an intercom system between rooms, and an en-suite bathroom featuring a triangular bath in black and gold onyx. The building is one of the most complete surviving examples of 1930s British luxury interior design, preserved intact and now managed by English Heritage.

The GYG entry ticket (t488091, from $20) covers the Art Deco mansion, the Great Hall, and the gardens. The gardens are modest by palace-garden standards but well maintained and provide a pleasant outdoor element to the visit. The total visit time is two to three hours for a thorough engagement with both the medieval and Art Deco elements. Getting there from central London is straightforward: trains from Charing Cross or London Bridge to Eltham take 20–25 minutes, with a 10-minute walk from the station.

The Tower of London, Kensington Palace, and Buckingham Palace — all already on this site — represent the standard London royal heritage circuit. Eltham adds the outer-London medieval-to-Art Deco layer that none of the central London sites provide, and it does so in a format that is never crowded in the way that the Tower or Kensington are crowded. The combination of three genuinely remarkable specific facts — the hammerbeam roof, the Courtauld Art Deco interiors, and the lemur — gives Eltham Palace a density of memorable detail that buildings ten times its size sometimes lack.