The Arts Society Welwyn Garden visit to Fulham Palace

The Arts Society Welwyn Garden visited Fulham Palace on 7 May. We had a guided tour of the building in the morning and another of the garden in the afternoon.

It was the home of the Bishops of London from AD 704. What remains today is a mishmash of buildings with the earliest an attractive Tudor courtyard with a diamond-shaped pattern in its facade of small pink bricks. The other rooms and buildings are largely the result of constant rebuilding by bishops who didn’t like the style and imposed their own ideas. The most significant of these, where people still live, was at one time Gothic but a later Bishop had other ideas so it’s now a typical tasteful Georgian building with large windows allowing plenty of light. I rather regretted the former style disappearing but our guide was firm that it was a big improvement. If you’re wondering how they could afford to rebuild, some of the bishops were very wealthy.

Another room has been restored to its original grand Georgian style with ornate plasterwork, only discovered recently when the walls were stripped of their modern covering in recent times.

One other building I’d like to mention is Bishop Porteus’s Library, a panelled 18th century room, with a secret door concealed behind mock shelves of large leather clad tomes. I couldn’t help wondering why the bishops needed a secret door. Was it just for fun, hide and seek perhaps (the bishops lived there with their families)), or did it serve a more serious function?

The large garden is unexpected with its trees from around the world, many of them hundreds of years old. They go back to an 18th century bishop whose passion was evidently trees. He went to America and brought back a large collection of them. They are a magnificent and imposing sight. Otherwise of note is a huge kitchen garden tended by a large number of volunteers, where vegetables are grown and sold to visitors.

The Palace is now a charity, having become run down and finally derelict once the bishops moved to a more desirable location, The Deanery, close to St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Palace was restored with the aid of a Lottery Fund grant. It must once have been magnificent, especially when Elizabeth 1 visited it for a feast. Oh to have seen it then!