It has a feeling of serendipity about it, built (and don’t forget the observatory) at different times for different reasons and I feel it really gains something from that, that more studied places like Blenheim or Marlborough or Castle Howard don’t have.

It is altogether marvellous. I will go again soon, and read your post beforehand, Gentle Author ..

Since the fifteenth century, the Palace of Pleasaunce commanded the bend in the river here, where Henry VIII was born in 1491 and Elizabeth I in 1533. Yet Inigo Jones’ Queen’s House built for Anne of Denmark (DIED 1618) and the words ‘Carolus Rex’ upon the eastern extremity of the Admiral’s House, originally begun in 1660 as a palace for Charles I (CHARLES I WAS EXECUTED IN 1649 — CHARLES II’S RESTORATION WAS 1660), are the only visible evidence today of this former royal residence abandoned at the time of the English Civil War (THE FIRST CIVIL WAR SORT OF KICKED OFF IN 1642).

May I humbly suggest you rewrite this paragraph? Maybe make one sentence about the original building(s), and a second about Charles II’s efforts to rennovate all the royal palaces? It was still a building site when Pepys and the Navy Board were moved there during the plague of 1665. It took until Mary II found a true use for it, as you reported, and the place came to life.

In my mind this place is strongly associated with Nelson. It was here that his body lay in state in 1806, in the Painted Hall, when thousands of people stood in a queue in silence for hours to pay their respects to the man whose leadership disabled France’s navy. There is a table in the Admiral’s House on which his body is said to have lain on arrival in Greenwich; it is an unimposing thing. And it was from the Water Gate that his coffin(s) departed, carried by sailors, to proceed up the Thames to his funeral and final resting place in St Paul’s. One could easily miss the pediment, placed as it is in the interior courtyard of King William Court, but it is visible from the annex off the Painted Hall where Nelson’s body rested before being installed under the catafalque. (There is–or was–access to the courtyard from the exterior of the Painted Hall.)

And–thank you, Christopher Wren–all this grandeur was designed for the use common sailors. I wonder if it made an impression on them at all. It was an institution dressed as a palace, but in my opinion that beats an institution that doesn’t dissimulate. Its purpose might have been to glorify the beneficence of the Queen, but we can still glory in it today.