Clarence House is, in fact, part of St James’s Palace, but as it has been used as a separate royal residence it deserves its own entry.
King George III’s third son William, Duke of Clarence (1765-1837) had lived in apartments at the west end of St James’s Palace since 1798. The Prince married Princess Adelaide in 1818 but for reasons of economy the Clarences lived abroad until 1822. In 1824 they were spending more time at St James’s and so the royal architect John Nash provided a new house for the Duke which incorporated parts of the older building. Nash’s three-storey stuccoed and painted front, entered through a cast iron portico at its west end, contrasted strongly with the brick façades of the Tudor buildings.
In 1830 when the Duke came to the throne as King William IV his brother George IV’s rebuilding of Buckingham Palace was still incomplete and so he continued to live at Clarence House when in London. In order to improve internal circulation a modest first-floor link was built in 1830 between Clarence House and the state apartments.
Queen Victoria had a large family and there were numerous close royal relations who needed housing and St. James’s Palace became the home of many of them. The Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s third son, was assigned Clarence House which he used until his death in 1942. In November 1947, it was announced that Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would make their home at Clarence House. In William IV’s time, it had been fully integrated with the State Apartments and, due to the improvements of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, in the 1870s, was the largest and most elegant of the apartments at St James’s. During the war, it had been used by the Red Cross, and in 1945, it had few bathrooms, only skeleton central heating, limited electricity and Victorian kitchens.
Although the Ministry of Works oversaw the restoration, the Prince and Princess were extremely closely involved, specifying work and supervising progress. Both the Ministry and the Royal Household had a close eye on the budget, with all works being categorised as either war damage, backlog maintenance or improvement. The Prince and Princess paid for the latter category themselves, partly funded by money given as wedding presents. Work complete, they took up residence in June 1949 – the final bill was £78,616.
Two bedroom suites were created and a nursery laid out; the house was rewired and central heating installed; there were new kitchens and a lift. Prince Philip requested a cinema in the basement and was prepared to bear the cost himself if the Treasury would not pay – he was saved from this by the cinema industry, which offered to present a screen, seats and projectors as a wedding gift.
Having taken such care in decorating their new house, the royal couple had every expectation of a long residence, but the early death of King George VI in 1952 changed that. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, who was only 52, now needed to vacate Buckingham Palace and she was assigned Clarence House, a building she thought ‘loathsome’.
Changes were made to the recently refurbished house at a cost of £10,800. Despite her early dislike of the house, it became the Queen Mother’s much-loved home, furnished with a growing collection of works of art, many of which were bought in the country house sales of the 1950s and 1960s. She lived there till her death in 2002.
After the Prince and Princess of Wales separated in 1995, the Prince moved from Kensington Palace into St James’s, and after the death of the Queen Mother in 2002 it was decided that the Prince should take up residence in Clarence House.
During the Queen Mother’s long residence, little had been done to the infrastructure of the house, and in 2002, a major project started to remove asbestos, install automatic fire detection and rewire the building. This was undertaken at a cost of £4.5 million from the royal palaces’ maintenance grant. The Prince paid a further £1.6 million from his own funds for internal redecoration and arrangement.
The Prince of Wales had employed the antique dealer and decorator, Robert Kime, at his country estate at Highgrove in Gloucestershire and to decorate previous apartments at St James’s, and he was commissioned to prepare Clarence House once the builders had finished. His brief was to use the Queen Mother’s furniture and paintings, mixing them with objects from store at Windsor Castle and some of the Prince’s own possessions. The house was to look like a much-loved family home. Work was completed and the Prince had moved in by August 2003, at the same time as it was announced that the house would be open to visitors each summer.