The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Victoria revisited
With the help of paint samples, journals and one impressive and intricately detailed doll’s house, the rooms at Kensington Palace where Queen Victoria spent her childhood have been restored, and reveal what it was like growing up in the royal household.
At Kensington Palace, a fresh look at the Queen’s early life
BY HER OWN ADMISSION, Queen Victoria’s years spent living at Kensington Palace, from her birth until just after she became Queen aged 18, were characterised by a certain melancholy. It was a time when she felt isolated, cut off from the world and increasingly under the control of her mother and her mother’s private secretary, John Conroy. Yet a new permanent exhibition at the palace, which opens on Friday – the 200th anniversary of the Queen’s birth – aims to give a happier view of her childhood, and a lighter side of her young life.
The exhibition will be staged in the suite of rooms where Victoria was born and brought up, which have been decorated to reflect how they might have looked during her formative years. ‘We want visitors to feel transported,’ says curator Claudia Acott-williams. ‘It will look like a home, not a museum. People will be seeing what Victoria saw when she was here.’
Exhaustive archival and forensic research into the original decorative schemes has been carried out over the past 10 years in order to work out what the rooms looked like. The researchers have looked at Victoria’s own journals and sketchbooks, correspondence from visitors to the palace, household accounts that reveal the suppliers used
and the amounts spent, and inventories detailing whether a room was carpeted or curtained.
Paint samples have been analysed to decide what colour was used and whether woodwork was painted or gilded. At one serendipitous moment, a door that had previously been blocked up was rediscovered, still fitted with the original doorknob from 1820.
Acott-williams insists that Victoria’s journals reveal her early childhood was comfortable and happy, and this lightness of spirit comes through in the gloriously patterned wallpapers and fabrics used to furnish the rooms. As she points out, ‘Victoria didn’t grow up in a Victorian palace, she grew up in a Regency palace.’ In other words, far from the sober colours, heavy designs and black-painted furniture that came to be associated with her reign following Prince Albert’s death, the rooms she lived in during her childhood would have been flamboyant, with bright wallcoverings and carpets, bold paint colours and ornate, gilded woodwork.
The rooms have been painted in
period shades by Farrow & Ball, and others colour-matched by Dulux to paint samples discovered there. Heritage wallpapers, some reproduced from scraps found still on the walls, have been digitally printed by historic wallpaper specialists Hamilton Weston and George Spencer. Carpet patterns come courtesy of the Brintons archive, and furniture will be a mix of beautifully restored original pieces and reproductions.
Visitors will walk through the rooms where Victoria played, where she first danced with Albert, and where she became Queen. Private moments in her early years will also be revealed, offering a more intimate look at her life there. Her own journals will be on display, as well as schoolwork and a book in which her governess would note down her behaviour each day.
Her travelling bed, which she used when touring the country, will be a key feature, as will the bed she slept in as an adult. Her doll’s house, which has never left the palace, is regarded as a historical decorative document in itself, as it would have been made by a palace carpenter and decorated using offcuts of wallpaper used in the palace interiors. One of the wallpapers in its tiny rooms, a pale-green pattern with white flowers, has been upscaled, printed and used to paper the walls of the room in which it is displayed. Other toys can also be viewed, including some of the Queen’s 132 dolls (each of which had a name), for which she and her governess would make clothes.
‘It’s been a process of pulling together information from many different sources,’ says Acott-williams. ‘We’ve looked again at the evidence, in order to understand Victoria through her own words.’
Victoria: A Royal Childhood opens at Kensington Palace on Friday; hrp.org.uk
One of the doll’s house papers has been upscaled and used to paper the walls of the palace