Queen Charlotte's Cottage
What Visitors Say
We walked to clean Charlotte’s cottage on one of the mini Pass and enjoyed the view from the outside. The inside is only open on weekends and bank holidays from my understanding.
Lovely little cottage and amazing to think that the Queen and family came here for there picnics all that time ago. It's just luck or dedicated planning as to whether you get in though! However even if it is closed the woodland is still beautiful and has recently been improved with a lovely boardwalk.
Highlights
Cottage Orné Architecture
Embodies late-1700s taste for idealised rural buildings in royal landscapes.Timbering, thatch and lattice windows perform ‘rusticity’ for a court that otherwise lived in palaces.
Exterior and ground-floor rooms
The Print Room
Preserves an 18th-century fashion for decorating walls with cut engravings instead of wallpaper.Pinned and pasted prints act like a scrapbook at room scale—news, travel and taste collaged for conversation.
Ground floor, south side
Royal Paddock Story
Traces Kew’s role as a living ‘cabinet of curiosities’.Records note kangaroos and other exotics kept near the cottage in the early 1800s—natural history as courtly spectacle.
Meadow and woodland around the cottage
Opening Hours
Fun Facts
The retreat dates to the 1770s–1780s and is associated with Queen Charlotte’s personal use of Kew as a family landscape, distinct from the formality of nearby Kew Palace.
Its ‘Print Room’ embodies a short-lived decorating craze (c. 1760–1800) where owners curated walls from engravings, often arranged in medallions and cartouches.
Contemporary accounts record a small menagerie at Kew—kangaroos were noted by visitors in the early 19th century—linking the cottage to royal natural-history interests.
