Looking for the White House

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in London, is known the world over for its botanical collections, but the area used to look quite different. The Hanoverian royal family, including the famously 'mad' King George III, built several palaces here and used them regularly.

Time Team was looking for the White House, one of the royal palaces at Kew, which was renowned for its grandeur but was suddenly demolished for no known reason in 1802. Was the White House an adapted earlier structure or a completely new building? Are the original plans, which the Team used to try to identify the remains of the palace, accurate? Time Team had the usual three days to find out.

Conundrums
Not all of the White House was demolished in 1802: the kitchens and orangery still survive as standing buildings. There is also an 18th-century plan by William Chambers, which purports to outline the location and structure of the palace. To cap it all, there is a sundial in Kew Gardens today that is supposed to mark the spot on which the palace stood. In theory at least, then, it should have been relatively straightforward to identify the location and layout.

The excavations threw up a few conundrums, however. The geophysics didn't match with the original Chambers plan. Time Team's landscape archaeologist Stewart Ainsworth and geophysics expert Henry Chapman produced an overlay of the Chambers plan with another map of the landscape. It suggested that the Team were digging too far south.

Archaeology tells the real story
Phil Harding disagreed: 'The archaeology in the ground tells us the real story.' After a few different theories get tried out, it looks as though Phil was right. The original 18th-century plan was wrong.

As the excavations continue, the dig unearths a cellar and even King George's toilet. There's evidence for fine living in the artefacts that are found – and, for those who enjoy a touch of romance and mystery about their palaces, there's even a tunnel from the kitchen to the house too.

New Discoveries at Royal Kew
Friday 28 March 2003
Kew Winter Lecture Series at Jodrell Lecture Theatre, Kew Gardens
Jonathon Foyle, assistant curator at Hampton Court and Kew Palace, featured in the Time Team programme filmed at Kew. In this lecture, open to the public, he outlines the Team's findings during the archaeological excavations and shows his own research into the site of the White House. He describes how the excavation trenches helped pinpoint the exact location and plan of the building and what new discoveries and clues were found.

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