Buckingham Palace _ The Basic Facts Simply Explained In Clear English

Buckingham Palace, home of British kings and queens over the years and a major tourist attraction in the UK. If you think Buckingham Palace has been the home to kings and queens for many hundreds of years, you'll be surprised to hear that the first monarch started living there less than 200 years ago. That monarch was Queen Victoria and she called it home from 1837. A monument to her lies right in front of the palace. The palace is huge with close to 800 rooms. 188 of them are bedrooms for the staff. Then there are staterooms, offices and nearly 80 bathrooms. That's not to mention a police and doctor's office, a post office as well as a movie theatre and swimming pool. To the rear of the palace is a huge garden which is the biggest private one in London. And in the summer a garden party hosted by the monarch takes place. Although Buckingham Palace is the main home of the monarch, the late Queen Elizabeth II didn't spend all of her time there. On the weekends she liked to stay at one of her other homes to the west called Windsor Castle which has even more rooms than Buckingham Palace and a much longer history. If you visit Buckingham Palace and want to know if the current monarch, King Charles III, is in the palace or not, there's a simple way to tell. Simply look at the palace flag. If you see the Union Jack flag it means the king is not home and if you see the Royal Standard flag he's home. You may not know but it's actually possible to go inside the palace and see many of the state rooms. The times and dates may change with King Charles but during Elizabeth's reign you could book tickets to enter in August and September which was when the Queen went on holiday to one of her other homes called Balmoral Castle in Scotland. As we come to the end of this video I only have time for one more fact and that fact is about time itself. Not surprisingly the huge palace has a lot of clocks, around 350 of them, but what is surprising is that there are timekeepers whose only job it is to keep them running correctly. Thanks for watching. Feel free to like and subscribe.