Pride in the palace

This is a book about England or, rather, an insight into the way English people think about and look at buildings. It is about that deep nostalgia for heroic times past which is still an essential part of the national psyche, in spite of New Labour's attempts to destroy it. For us, Hampton Court conjures up the glory of the Tudors and the magnificence of its court in the unforgettable figure of Henry VIII. Even in 2004 no English person can visit it without a surge of national pride.

What Simon Thurley proves is that the palace was conceived from the outset to evoke just such responses. This is a brilliant book, the definitive history of one of our greatest national architectural treasures vividly brought to life in a breathtaking panorama which sweeps us through five centuries of our history and a gallery of kings and queens, princes and princesses, not to mention architects, builders and gardeners.

This is a palace envisioned as Camelot-on-Thames presided over by the Tudor reincarnation of King Arthur and his knights. It is stage scenery on a stupendous scale involving the building, for instance, of a vast great hall, not because it was ever going to be regularly used, but merely because it was the ultimate symbol of the romantic regal

splendour of a bygone age. Even by the time of the reign of Mary's daughter, Elizabeth, Hampton Court had mummified, preserved unchanged as a monument to the dynasty. That reverence for it was not lost on the early Stuarts who followed, nor even on the Parliamentarians when it came to selling up and demolishing the royal palaces after the abolition of the monarchy. For Cromwell and his cronies, too, this building was a visible testimony to the lost golden age of the Tudors and to a king who had laid low the Pope and given the Bible in English to his subjects.

Even when Dutch William III started, after the revolution of 1688, to demolish the 16th century building in order to construct his answer to Versailles, that sense of the sacrosanct still pertained, for the great hall was to be retained. Although Hampton Court was to die as a living royal palace in 1737, on the death of George II's queen, Caroline, the mystique was not to wither as what they called the Gothic past was rediscovered.

In the aftermath of the passing of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the palace was shortly after opened to the public. Again it was seen as a monument to the nation's glorious past, one now to be shared and celebrated by every class of society. And so it has been down to our own day, which has seen the spectacular restoration and re-presentation of the palace by the author of this book. Everyone should be eternally grateful to him for providing us with surely one of the best building biographies ever written.

Roy Strong's The Laskett: The Story of a Garden is published by Bantam Books at £25.