The story
Above the fireplace in the King's Gallery at Kensington Palace is a dial with a map of northwest Europe and a single pointer. Chains and pulleys link it to a vane on the roof. It was made for William III, so that from this room he could tell which way the wind was blowing for his fleet and for the posts from the Continent, and it still works.
William and his wife Mary II bought what was then a Jacobean house in the village of Kensington in 1689, partly because the air suited his asthma better than Whitehall by the river, and Christopher Wren enlarged it. In the 1720s George I had the painter and designer William Kent redecorate the state rooms. On the walls of the King's Staircase Kent painted the court looking down from a gallery, among them Peter the Wild Boy, found living in a German forest and brought to London, shown in a green coat with oak leaves in his hand. The King's Gallery still holds paintings from the Royal Collection, among them Tintoretto's The Muses.
The palace's best-known birth came in 1819, when Princess Victoria was born here. She grew up in these rooms under a strict regime devised by her mother, and on 20 June 1837 she was woken early to be told she was queen. Members of the royal family have kept apartments here ever since, among them Diana, Princess of Wales, and since 2021 a statue of her has stood in the Sunken Garden outside.
