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Eltham Palace

Edward IV's great hall of the 1470s bolted to the Courtaulds' Art Deco house of the 1930s, with a lemur's heated bedroom between them.

Photo by Tom Parnell from Dunfermline, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in Architecture.

Eltham was a royal palace from 1305, when the Bishop of Durham gave it to Edward II, and for two centuries the kings kept Christmas here; Henry IV entertained the only Byzantine emperor ever to visit England in the winter of 1400, Edward IV built the great hall in the 1470s under the third-largest hammerbeam roof in the country, and Henry VIII grew up in it. Then the court moved to Greenwich and Eltham fell down, the hall serving as a barn. In 1933 Stephen Courtauld, of the textile family, and his wife Virginia leased the ruin and built a new house against the hall: a circular entrance hall lined in Swedish veneers under a glass dome, a dining room in bird's-eye maple with black and silver doors, Virginia's bathroom in gold mosaic with an onyx bath, underfloor heating, a built-in vacuum system and loudspeakers for the gramophone in every room, all of it the last word in 1936. Their ring-tailed lemur, Mah-Jongg, had a heated bedroom of his own with a ladder down to the ground floor. The Courtaulds left in 1944, the army took over, and English Heritage restored the whole thing, which opens daily with the moat, the bridge and the gardens around it.

Where
Court Yard, SE9 5QE
Nearest station
Mottingham · 10 min walk

Step-free access

Opening hours, as recorded in OpenStreetMap: Apr-Oct Mo-Su 10:00-17:00; Nov-Feb Sa-Su 10:00-16:00; Mar We-Su 10:00-16:00; SH "Various"

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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