Queen's House
Inigo Jones’s cool, mathematical masterpiece (1616–36) anchors Greenwich like a tuning fork for British classicism. Inside, a quiet jewel box of art—Tudor to contemporary—meets an architecture that choreographs light and movement. Come for the Tulip Stairs, stay for the Armada Portrait, and leave with the sense that every proportion has been tuned to human pace and breath.
Opening Hours
What's not to miss inside?
Tulip Stairs
Britain’s first geometric self-supporting spiralA helix with no central column—each step locks the next in place like a stone zipper.
📍 South-west corner spiral
The Great Hall
A perfect cube for performance and displayBlack-and-white marble floor, sky-lit calm—the room is a demonstration of Renaissance proportion theory.
📍 Centre of the plan
Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I
Power painted as pageantPearls, ships and hand on globe—decode a whole foreign policy in one canvas.
📍 First-floor galleries
Van de Velde Room
Where seascape went professionalFather and son court painters ran a studio here in the 1670s, turning naval battles into high art.
📍 Marine art suite
Inspire your Friends
- Queen’s House is the first fully classical building in England—Inigo Jones imported ideas from Italy and made them London-ready.
- The Tulip Stairs have no central support—each tread bears on the wall and on its neighbour, a stone engineering lesson you can walk.
- Marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and Younger had a studio here in the 1670s, effectively inventing ‘Royal Navy PR’ in paint.
- One of the three surviving ‘Armada Portraits’ of Elizabeth I lives here—look for pearls (chastity), the globe (reach) and collapsing Spanish masts (propaganda).
