Banqueting House

We visited the Banqueting House last weekend and was quite surprised by it. We were ushered into a room to watch a film which was a bit overlong and then repeated in a rather drawn out audio guide. Information could be delivered in a much better way than this! Beautiful room though and an amazing ceiling! If you are an art lover, it's definitely worth a look. Still, it's quite expensive and I probably would have been a bit disappionted if I had paid the entrance fee. We are members of the Historic Royal Palaces and this is one of the five so that was really our motivation for checking it out.

I went here with the London Pass, so I didn't pay. To be quite honest, if I had paid, I would have felf ripped off.

This place is very interesting, well King Charles the first was executed in, or just outside the building. He spent his last moments here, before stepping through the upstairs window, to the scaffold. The hall is, I presume just as it was in the 1600's, when the king was killed. But the problem is, that this is just a large hall, with a nice ceiling. At one end there is a throne, but most disappointingly you cannot follow in the footsteps of the late king, and cannot go up to the balcony. The film show is good, but doesn't justify the asking price. There is a small sad space in the basement that is wasted on local artists.

This place could be so much more. Just WAKE UP and OPEN it up. There is so much potential here.