Queen's House
⭐ Highligts
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
Opening Hours
🤓 Fun Facts
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).
