A Palace Out of Time

Deep in the suburbs surrounding London City is a quiet mansion neighborhood where huge houses stand in lines mere meters apart. Located at the very end of the street is a chest high brick wall and a large iron gate. This is the entrance to Eltham Palace, once a Tudor vacation palace turn 30’s millionaire home, now an architectural, design, and historical marvel for tourists and locals alike. Your first steps onto the extensive property are over a long, massive, stone bridge that once would have allowed passage over a mote but now serve as a viewing point for the gardens below. 
The house itself, even from the outside, looks to be a conglomeration of the medieval and the modern. The entrance into main living space has the look of a 30’s building with it’s combination of brick and granite but if you merely look to your right you see stained glass arches reaching up to the sky like a church and what is left of the original ballroom.

Before laying a foot past the threshold we were asked to put on shoe covers, Ikea bag blue. I thought about following the visitor guide signs but I decided to travel in the space how felt natural to me, though if you want to learn more the history of the house I highly suggest grabbing an audio headset from the second floor. To get to the ballroom from the inside you turn right immediately going past the stairs and follow a narrow back hallway that widens out, begging you to explore the rooms on either side. I think it’s fitting that the library is right next to the ballroom, though it’s smaller than I expected from an old castle. None of the canon pieces of intellectual literature were missing but were equally accompanied by more popular authors. Plato and Socrates stood on shelves, sentinel to intellect and philosophy, but were not far from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. Probably the coolest part of the whole interior was that you could tell it was lived in. The carpet was clean but looked lived on, from years of the family walking and spilling drinks on it.

Walking into the ballroom itself was a magical moment. It felt like stepping into my favorite book series, The All Souls Trilogy, where the main character travels back in time at one point to Tudor era Europe. I was figuratively and physically spinning trying to take in as much of the room as I could as efficiently as possible, I didn’t want to miss an inch. Images of dancing, eating and to much drinking flooded my brain. There was a beautiful balance of revelry and reverence between the worn stone floor and the half dozen stain-glass coat-of-arms. Just past the ballroom was a sunroom, that I could see myself reading in if I ever had the chance to live in a place like this, and it opened out to the extensive gardens. 

I have never in my life seem gardens like these on a private estate. They raped around the entire property and extended well past the back. In the front is a well with a rose bushing growing beside it like a fairytale. And each area was designed in different ways to best compliment the nature curvature of the hills. Even in March the trees and flowers were all in bloom, shades of green we haven’t seen since September. Ponds and courtyards decked out this multi-level gardeners paradise.

To get to the lower gardens you had two choices. The first, on the right side, was a narrow stairway that lead to a tunnel. I assume it was at one point a servant access point. The second, on the left, was a twisted but large stair way that tells its age with the small stalactites growing from the ceiling as a result of the quintessential rainy British weather. And once down into the Gardens trails lead you around the perimeter of the Palace. In a secluded part of the gardens, tucked away in a semicircular shrub was an adorable private seating area that I could imagine hiding away in alone or with a lover. I never wanted to leave that garden.

 

Eltham Palace was breath of fresh air that I know I personally needed after our first few days in the city. Unlike Buckingham Palace or a museum this is history you can touch and exist in.  If I ever go back to the UK I will most definitely be returning and I recommend it as a necessary stop if you want a truly diverse experience of what London is.