• Email this page

The Enchanted Palace

Kensington Palace is being transformed

In association with WILDWORKS, featuring Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest, Stephen Jones, Boudicca, Aminaka Wilmont and Echo Morgan

Opens 26 March 2010

The South front of Kensington Palace

From 26 March 2010, Kensington Palace will become The Enchanted Palace in a unique multisensory exhibition combining fashion, performance, and dazzling spectacle to reveal Kensington's magnificent State Apartments in a magical new light.

In the sumptuous State Apartments, leading fashion designers Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest, Stephen Jones, Boudicca, Aminaka Wilmont and illustrator/set designer Echo Morgan will each create spectacular installations in collaboration with WILDWORKS, taking inspiration from Kensington Palace and the princesses who once lived there - Mary, Anne, Caroline, Charlotte, Victoria, Margaret and Diana. These extraordinary contemporary designs will be displayed alongside historic items from the Royal Collection and Kensington Palace's Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, together with two dresses worn by Diana, Princess of Wales and Princess Margaret.

The complex and mysterious world of the royal court will be opened up through spectacular installations, interactive theatre, intimate storytelling, soundscapes, haunting film projections, and a series of intriguing clues hidden throughout the historic rooms, revealing tales of love and hate, surprise and sadness, secrets and jealousy.

Each room will have a powerful story to tell about Kensington Palace's former royal residents and the life of the court - a world within a world, with its own time and rituals.


Entrance to The Enchanted Palace will be included in the Kensington Palace ticket price. 

Click here for opening hours >
Click here for ticket prices > 

The transformation of Kensington Palace

'Welcome to Kensington - a palace for everyone' is a £12 million major project to transform Kensington Palace by improving accessibility, introducing new education and community facilities, reconnecting the palace with the surrounding park through new public gardens, and enabling us to present exciting exhibitions inspired by the palace's rich past and unique collections. Major works will begin in June 2010 and are scheduled for completion in June 2012 in time for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics.


WILDWORKS

WILDWORKS is an international theatre company, based in Cornwall. WILDWORKS produces unique landscape theatre in challenging places and with extraordinary communities. Their productions have been sited in old quarries, derelict mines, working fishing quays, abandoned department stores, dockyards, a Napoleonic citadel, the Green Line in Nicosia… They have worked with gospel choirs, drama groups, local artists, surfers, tea dance regulars, North African migrants, cake-makers, ex-miners, a young hip-hop group, abseilers and a Hell's Angels chapter.