The Whitehall Palace Plan of 1670

In its heyday, Whitehall covered some 23 acres with at least 1500 rooms for courtiers’ lodgings.  Save for the Banqueting Hall, this plan is all we have left of Stuart and Tudor Whitehall.  It provides us with an insight, a peep-show, into the teeming, jostling, colourful, competitive, over-crowded labyrinth which was Charles II’s Restoration Court and, at the same time, reveals the topography underlying a vital part of modern London.