White Lodge Museum and Ballet Resource Centre
What Visitors Say
This is an amazing mansion in Richmond Park which has been occupied by English Kings and Queens. Now the Royal Ballet School. Very impressive building and location. And park deer roaming free. They can be well camouflaged as seen in the photos 😊
Seems better now , but not many one star reviews because the parents are too scared to say how bad this school is. Under C Powney & Hope K , this school was the worse! The list of failures under there administration is too many to post here. Shameful
Infamous King Edward VIII (Queen's uncle) was born here in 1894. His mother Queen Mary and grandmother lived here as well as Queen Elizabeth's parents. Queen Victoria and Albert lived in White Lodge in their last year together in 1861 after death of Queen's mother. But the first owner of the house was King George II, his wife Caroline and first UK Prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. It was royal property until 1955.
Excellent school compound, professional, polite, friendly atmosphere and relaxing place.
What an impressive building in the middle of the Richmond park. Commissioned in 1725 as a hunting lodge for George I, White Lodge remains part of the Crown Estate to this day and partly housing the well known The Royal Ballet School. Here a little bit of a history: A misunderstood politician John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (1713–1792) was appointed Ranger of the Park by George III in 1761 and took up residence at White Lodge. In 1801, George III assigned White Lodge to Henry Addington (a middle-class Prime Minister), later Viscount Sidmouth, as a ‘grace and favour’ residence. Addington, who served as Prime Minister from 1801 to 1804, remained at the Lodge until his death in 1844. The Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary (Sissi) (1837–1898) stayed at White Lodge for the hunting season in the summer of 1874. In 1881 Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were guests, the famous Victorian actors, who had recently starred at the Lyceum Theatre as Hamlet and Ophelia in Shakespeare’s tragic play of Hamlet. In January 1912, the famous ballerina, Anna Pavlova, and her partner, Laurent Novikoff, performed at Richmond Theatre with the members of the Company of the Imperial Ballet, St Petersburg. Many decades later, students of The Royal Ballet School would follow in Pavlova’s footsteps, dancing each summer at Richmond Theatre during the 1970s and 1980s. On 13 August 1924, there was another royal birth at White Lodge. Prince Aleksander Pavlov Karadorevic was born to Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark and Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, in the same room as that in which Prince Edward of Wales had been born, 30 years earlier. The marriage of Mrs Reynolds Albertini and Colonel James Veitch of the Coldstream Guards was reported in the Evening News on 12 April 1950. They continued to occupy White Lodge after the war, and hosted Marshal Tito there when he came to England on a state visit, March 1953. The Foreign Office agreed to Tito’s entourage being 29 strong, but let only 12 reside with him at White Lodge. For security reasons, Tito was not accommodated in a London. During the Autumn Term of the new academic year 1955/6, the first cohort of students boarding at White Lodge had to travel to their daily lessons at the School's Colet Gardens site in Barons Court, as the Stable Block classrooms were not yet ready.
Highlights
Margot Fonteyn’s pointe shoes
Iconic footwear from Britain’s best-known ballerina connects technique, repertoire and star persona.Look for wear patterns that reveal rehearsal grind versus performance polish.
Main display cases
Anna Pavlova’s death mask
A rare, sober memorial to the dancer who brought classical ballet to mass audiences worldwide.Pairs mythic image with the reality of an artist’s early death—and the legend that followed.
Biographical objects section
Oliver Messel’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ costume (1946)
A touchstone of post-war ballet style from the production that helped define the Royal Ballet look.See how fabric, silhouette and embellishment read from the stalls under stage light.
Stage & costume design
Letters about Lydia Lopokova
Correspondence (including by John Maynard Keynes) shows how ballet intersected with Bloomsbury-era culture and patronage.Art, finance and love affairs braided into the institution’s early growth.
Archive highlights / resource centre
Opening Hours
Fun Facts
When it opened, White Lodge Museum was billed as Britain’s first purpose-built museum dedicated to classical ballet.
The museum sits inside White Lodge, a Palladian hunting lodge begun in the late 1720s and historically associated with George II; scholarship links its design to architect Roger Morris.
