Hampton Court Palace

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey began building Hampton Court in 1515 as a residence grand enough to reflect his standing as Henry VIII's chief minister and Lord Chancellor. As Wolsey fell from royal favour in the late 1520s, most notably over his failure to secure the king's annulment from Catherine of Aragon, he signed the palace over to Henry in 1529 in a last, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to appease him; Wolsey died the following year, before he could be tried for treason.

Henry expanded his new prize lavishly, adding the Great Hall and, in 1540, the astronomical clock that still tracks the position of the sun, the phase of the moon and the signs of the zodiac from above one of the courtyard gateways. Much of the palace still preserves the redbrick grandeur of his Tudor court, from the vast kitchens to the ceremonial state rooms.

Two centuries after Henry, William III and Mary II commissioned Christopher Wren to modernise the palace in the fashionable Baroque style of the day. Rather than demolish the old Tudor buildings outright, Wren's symmetrical classical wing was grafted directly onto Henry's rambling red-brick rooms, and the join was never smoothed over: walk from one courtyard to the next and the palace visibly switches from crenellated Tudor towers and chimneys to Wren's cool, orderly stonework, a rare case of two centuries of royal taste standing side by side rather than one erasing the other.

The gardens hide an equally famous curiosity: the trapezoidal Hampton Court Maze, planted around 1700 and the oldest surviving hedge maze in Britain. Its half-mile of paths has been confounding visitors for over three centuries, memorably including the hapless characters in Jerome K. Jerome's comic novel Three Men in a Boat, who get hopelessly and hilariously lost inside it.

Hampton Court Palace sits outside central London, in Richmond upon Thames, and is best reached by direct train from London Waterloo to Hampton Court station, a journey of around 35 minutes; a scenic river boat service also runs from central London in the warmer months.

Given the scale of the site — the state apartments, the Tudor kitchens, the gardens and the maze — it's worth allowing a full half-day for a visit. Opening hours shift with the seasons, running later in spring and summer than in autumn and winter, so it's worth checking the current schedule before you set off.