Kew Palace

Built in 1631 by a City of London merchant, the palace is actually a brick mansion with a distinctly Dutch look. In the eighteenth century, it was here that George III was confined during episodes of the mysterious and debilitating illness that is now believed to have been porphyria. On the ground floor there's an audiovisual display about the 15 children George III had with Queen Charlotte (when the King was well the royal family often stayed at Kew Palace in the summer. In Queen Charlotte's bedroom there's the black horsehair chair in which she died and in an ante room is the ivory brocade waistcoat that George III wore in his own final days at Windsor, blind and deaf and unaware that his wife had died two years earlier. It's well-worn and stained and, like that sad chair, unexpectedly moving. In contrast to the decorated and furnished rooms below, the princesses' bedrooms on the second floor are empty, left pretty much as they were found, having been shut up since 1816. Outside there's a formal garden facing the Thames and an apothecary garden overflowing with medicinal plants.