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Historic royal palaces including Hampton Court has been working with Kingston University
really closely for ages, there’s such a lot that we have in common, we’re practically
next door for heaven sake and they are interested in history and culture, they even come and
bring their students here and do musical performances and drama performances in the great hall.
The knowledge transfer partnership consists of Kingston University on one side, historic
royal palaces at the other and in the middle we had a research curator for three years
who was responsible for getting the knowledge out of the university and into our visitor
displays.
The particular one that was held at Hampton Court sort of broke records because visitor
numbers which is kind of the crudest measure of it’s success it went up like that, really
before and afterwards you could see that there were 100,000 extra visitors coming to Hampton
Court and more importantly than that, even I would say, they were having a really good
time when they got here and they were learning all sorts of things about Tudor history and
Henry the 8th and getting excited about the past.
In our last big project which was the knowledge transfer partnership we were looking particularly
at the Tudor side of Hampton Court and Henry the 8th and the part that people will know
about but we’ve got here the baroque palace.
This is England’s Versailles really and this is the site that now needs our attention
so people get to know that it’s here. Next year, 2013 at Hampton Court we’re having
an exhibition called Secrets of the Royal Bed Chamber and it’s going to explore what
the King actually did in bed and how his beds were looked after. So we had the idea of going
to Kingston University and say look we need some help here, we need some research. They
gave us a PhD student who worked for three years on this very topic. Her name’s Olivia
Fryman, she’s achieved marvels, she’s done some really, really interesting work.
The exhibition’s going to explore themes such as royal death, royal births, marriages,
ceremonies that all took place in the bed chamber and my research looked at those rituals
and ceremonies and so erm, it’s going to provide a lot of interpretation for the exhibition.
So Hampton Court is really unique in that it has erm, two fantastic state bed chambers
and two private bed chambers that survive reasonably well intact today so it’s been
a wonderful place to study and a wonderful place to see objects in their original location.
We’ve got inside there the countries best collection of enormous four poster magnificent
state beds and you’re going to be able to come and see them all.
The royal bed chambers here at Hampton Court are really interesting because they’re not
all designed to be slept in. The King and Queen actually had between two and three bed
chambers and only the most private of those would have been slept in. The state bed chamber
from the reign of Charles the 2nd onwards becomes a much more public ceremonial space,
Charles had lived at the French court during his exile and during the interregnum and he
bought back French customs to the English court and that transformed the royal bed chamber
into a much more theatrical performative space. So within that room he would have allowed
courtiers to watch him dressing with his bed chamber servants, but he would also use the
room for more formal occasions such as knighting courtier’s and the rituals of births, marriages
and deaths were also held in the bed chamber.
It’s been a wonderful four years of research and I feel that I’ve been welcomed both
by Hampton Court and Kingston; they’ve been brilliant providing support between the two
institutions. This was just a really, really exciting project, something that was new and
different and a real challenge.