Buckingham Palace Tour VR

hello you're at buckingham palace which is the official residence of her majesty the queen and you're going to come with me for a tour so please come on in you're now standing inside the grand entrance of buckingham palace and buckingham palace is the home of her majesty the queen the duke of edinburgh and the other members of the royal family so it's a beautiful place but it's a working working palace and that's what's really important to remember now my role as master of the household is a very ancient role it's over 400 years old it started off with james the first and 1603 so in modern terms i would say people would call me the chief operations officer for the queen so i'd now like to introduce you to anna reynolds anna come forward anna is the curator for paintings for royal collection trust i'm going to take you on an expedition through buckingham palace today pointing out some of the highlights and showing you the various different rooms that make up the palace but this wasn't always a palace buckingham palace wasn't always a palace it was actually originally a smaller house called buckingham house and it belonged to the duke of buckingham which is who it's named after and it was bought as a private family home by george iii his son george iv decided that he wanted to make it more magnificent and turn it into a palace and he engaged the architect nash john nash to make changes to the palace make this make the rooms bigger he actually made the entrance hall here he lowered the floor so that the ceiling would appear taller and he added these amazing flights of stairs that really give you this sense of excitement as you move up into the rest of the state rooms something that you might spot are all the different marble columns that are around this room there were originally 104 here in the marble hall that's why it's called the marble hall and in 1829 one very very large block of marble was brought along the thames and it actually weighed as much as two double decker buses so you can imagine it took 17 horses to transport it here so we're going to continue up up the grand staircase one of the most expensive things in the palace is something that you might not expect it's the balustrade that you can see here making up the banister and this is actually made of gilt bronze so it's bronze that's been cast into this very ornate foliate design and then covered in a very thin layer of gold and it makes up this grand staircase so as visitors move up from the darkness of the grand entrance into the light up here it creates this magnificent feeling so after you come up the grand staircase and through the guard room you enter the green drawing room and i think it's quite easy to understand why it's called the green drawing room and it's always actually the walls have always been hung with green silk and they're replaced about every 30 years but you can also see in here you've got green upholstered furniture and green serve porcelain on the various different mantelpieces and on the cabinets that are around the room now one of my favorite pictures in this in the whole collection and in this room is this one here which shows three daughters of george the third and i love this painting because it shows three children who actually lived here when this was buckingham house when it was still a private home and now we're going to go into the throne room now this magnificent room is the throne room so as you walk up the ground staircase you progress through the different rooms and you reach the throne room and you find the throne so her majesty queen elizabeth's throne is on the left and then her husband's prince philip the duke of edinburgh is on the right now what makes this room so special and feels so special is the fact that it was designed by a theater designer so that element of theatricality is everywhere there are swags of curtains that look like curtains that close onto a stage you've got these amazing sparkling chandeliers that now are electric light but originally when this room was built would have been candlelight we're now standing in the picture gallery at buckingham palace which is an incredibly long room that was created by knocking through three rooms in the original buckingham house it's right in the middle of the palace this room and it was made for george iv because he wanted to display his amazing collection of paintings george iv absolutely loved paintings and he bought particularly dutch art which is what you can see surrounding on the walls at this end of the room the other type of paintings that are in here there are lots of italian pictures and one that i'd like to point out to you is this view of venice by the italian artist canaletto now caneletto we have we have the largest collection of canelettos in the royal collection that exists anywhere in the world there are over 50 in the royal collection and they were all bought as a group they came into the collection by george iii actually in 1762 when he bought console smith's collection he just bought an entire group of pictures and used them to decorate his palaces now to tell you a bit more about what this room looks and feels like on the evening of a state banquet i'm going to pass over to the master again thank you very much well you can imagine this is the centerpiece of a state visit the state banquet which is a fabulous event and really spectacular as you can imagine it is the atmosphere is electric exactly where i'm sitting standing now is where the queen was it is the top table so the queen is sitting here she can see me and eyeball me very clearly if anything's going wrong and the head of state is on her right hand side and you can imagine there are over 200 people in this room we've got 171 guests and the tables are groaning with silver and gold with over five and a half thousand pieces of silver over two thousand pieces of cutlery knives four spoons and over a thousand glasses all georgian glasses well over 200 years old each of them and we've got about 80 of my staff serving these 171 people four courses five types of wine at the end of which the finale is created by 12 pipers walking around the ballroom filling the whole room with a glorious sound of bagpipes and they they really do sound fantastic so it gives a completely new meaning to all surround sound now this is the white drawing room it's another one of the rooms that the queen uses for entertaining so receiving guests and you can see it's one of the most ornate with amazing chandeliers um yellow upholstered furniture and then over in that corner there's a gold piano it's a piano made by the firm called errod and it was bought by princess queen victoria when she was queen and she actually played the piano very very well with her husband and this piano is decorated with mischievous monkeys making music and getting up to all sorts of trouble another amazing work of art in this room is this desk which is from the late 18th century and it was made by the cabinet maker jean-henry reisner and it's inlaid with all sorts of different woods and originally when it was made the woods would have been different colours so the patterns that you can see which are flowers and fruit would have stood out much more strongly but even within six months of it being made they'd faded to all these different kind of browns now this desk is actually very special because it has a complicated mechanical mechanism inside that reasoner was known for and you can actually only open the lower drawers when the top of the desk is rolled back so it has kind of secret drawers and secret hidden compartments and there's actually another secret in this room that i'm going to show you if you follow me not everyone gets to see this this is a room where the queen can suddenly appear into this room and that's because there's a secret door when you look at this wall you see the fireplace and on either side you see cabinets with porcelain and candelabra on top but the cabinet on the left actually opens and it reveals the secret door it's very heavy and that's where the queen comes in from her private apartments when she's meeting guests here but i just wanted to say thank you so much for letting me show you around back in palace i hope you've enjoyed it i hope you've enjoyed finding out more about the rooms and about some of the amazing paintings and works of art here well we really hope you've enjoyed your tour of buckingham palace with anna we've certainly enjoyed having you and thank you so much for coming to join us now if you've got any interest at all in anything else you've seen anything caught your eye whether it's a picture or work of art um please don't hesitate to visit our website it's royal collection dot org dot uk and lots of information there particularly about schools resources any school trips any learning resources or teaching resources all on that website for all the occupy palaces specifically bucky and palace but also windsor castle in berkshire england and also the palace of hollywood house in edinburgh in scotland but thank you so much for coming again and please come back and visit us again soon goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Smart Stone Technology

Views: 405,908

Keywords: VR, education

Id: A826txR6rus

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020