Perilous Palace: Mind Your Manors, Your Majesty

The Palace Gets Fixed Up Before It All Comes Tumbling Down.

- Kate Russell

House renovations are always stressful, what with the packing and unpacking, the dust, the wires, the breakages and the nasty surprises.

Multiply that by 775 rooms, 1,514 doors and 760 windows and you have a nightmare – one the Queen is facing in modernising and restoring Buckingham Palace.

Fortunately, Her Majesty is made of sterner stuff than her humble subjects – even when told that she will have to leave the private apartments she has occupied since coming to the throne in 1952.

According to a senior courtier, “The Queen is immensely pragmatic and she wants to stay in the palace. She said, ‘Let me know where you would like me to go.’”

The scale of the essential work to the building, which dates back to 1703 and has not been updated for between 40 and 60 years, is breathtaking.

It centres around replacing potentially lethal electrical wiring, lead piping, antiquated boilers and thousands of fixtures and fittings. That means upgrading 160km of electrical cabling, along with 6,500 electrical sockets, 5,000 light fittings and 330 fuse boxes. Then there’s 32km of heating pipework, 16km of water pipework, 2,500 radiators and 500 pieces of sanitary ware. Plus, 32km of skirting boards and 30,000 square metres of floorboards – the equivalent of 3.5 football pitches – will also be torn out and reinstated.

No wonder the project will last for 10 years and the bill is expected to top $748 million.

There is, says the Master of The Queen’s Household, Tony Johnstone-Burt, no choice but to go ahead.

“We are convinced that by making this investment in Buckingham Palace now, we can avert a much more costly and potentially catastrophic building failure in years to come,” he says.