Palace / CastleWindsor Castle

Regrettably the title of this review does rather let the cat out of the bag, for that my profuse apologies, but as is often the case on some of the more controversial reviews I did think long and hard about the title - resulting in the one you see above. If this review is seen as treasonous, may I just hope that access is not denied to the internet whilst serving at Her Majesty's pleasure. If treason is still a hanging offence then I bequeath my worldly goods to....

Three months later (after our visit!) and with my credit card statement still fresh in my mind further rubbing my nose in it, I am still as you can see, smarting over this one!

Adrianna, my Polish wife, had been resident in England for some three years, when, quite by chance, we wound up in Windsor one grey, cold Saturday afternoon in February. Wandering around this lovely town, with its superb range of shops, we walked up one of the steep streets and there in front of us was a fairly large castle.

"What's this place?"

"Well it is where the Queen lives when out of London - Windsor Castle."

We walk around the edge of the castle keep and find next to the visitor entrance a board showing the admission prices.

"At £12.50 each, I think that we'll have to leave it for a special occasion, next summer perhaps when your parents visit us on holiday from Poland?"

"Oh yes that would be a good idea! They'd love to see a place like this"

Well, back in August my parents in law were here on holiday and on the first day (Monday) that the rain stopped we arrived in Windsor soon after 1.00 on a blustery afternoon. Having managed to park the car, no mean feat here, we headed straight up the High Street to join the long queue of people waiting to gain entry into the castle.

Since my last visit to Windsor Castle, in 1983(!) things have changed somewhat. In those days you were free to walk the ramparts, look at the buildings from the outside, only having to pay if you wished to enter the state rooms or St George's Chapel. Now you have to pay £12.50 for an all-in ticket, lump it or leave it.

Fair enough, from the numbers queuing - it took us about 30 minutes to gain admission - there are plenty of people willing to pay any price to see inside this, the largest inhabited castle in Europe. That was their billing incidentally, not mine!

To rub salt into my wounds there are also Royal Staff "working the crowds" attempting to get everyone to sign Gift Aid declaration forms. Now I'm a great supporter of this, any charitable donations, English Heritage and our ss Great Britain membership included, are always gift aided. For those of you not familiar with this scheme, you sign a form either an annual declaration (memberships) or at point of purchase and the government returns 28% of your donation or entry fee to the charity in the form of tax relief. I was approached in a highly officious and condescending manner, which elicited the following (and totally out of character) response:

"Good God, do you not think we all pay enough already to maintain places like these?"

"Excuse ME Sir, but we do not receive a penny in government aid to cover the cost of running or maintenance - Windsor Castle is a registered charity!"

I was speechless! Do you think I can open a couple of rooms and a small portion of MY garden to the public, rake in huge admission charges and then claim charitable status for my home? No, thought NOT! Outside of review sites nobody has ever heard of Richada, and for very good reason, he is not one of the countries richest and most well known people!

There was a fairly elderly gentleman with his wife and two grandchildren in front of us, he had not enough money to cover the cost of entry - obviously he was not going to let the kids down and had to resort, as I did, to handing over his credit card. He was not slow in voicing his opinion to the staff about the cost of visiting this "national asset"!

I am not into "sour grapes" reviews, nor do I ever set out to write a review with the sole intention of putting people off visiting an attraction... However, I have to say here, that although my parents in law really enjoyed visiting Windsor Castle, for my wife and I the feeling of being taken for a ride never really left us thought our visit.

Just as importantly, my 11 year old sister in law who also accompanied us was less than enamoured with the visit, most of it was well over her head and as my wife so eloquently puts it "there was nothing child friendly about the place". Her ticket had cost £6.50.

After queuing to get in you are then processed through an airport style security scanner, publicly emptying the contents of your pockets into a tray, then you are free to visit the castle. Once inside you can stop at the guide book shop and pay £5.00 for an "Official Guidebook" with the Royal Crest on it - a quite ordinary publication of its' type and at least £1 over priced. Anything in Polish? You MUST be joking! We declined the 'special offer' of an audio tour to accompany the guidebook for £6.95. Everywhere else we have visited this year the audio guides have been included in the entry price, here if you want only an Audio guide it will cost £2.95. Adrianna asked if you got to keep the guide at the end of the tour!

The first point of interest is the Castle Exhibition Centre, a large long gallery type room attempting to portray in pictures the every day life at the castle. Suddenly the penny drops, the queen is only 'in residence' here for just six weeks per year. Two weeks in April and four in June. Apart from the occasional state banquets what we were seeing on this day was every day life here, thousands of tourists swarming over this place which is no more than a glorified tourist attraction - albeit a registered charity.

Here in this room is a very good record of the devastating fire which swept through the State rooms on 20th November 1992 and the painstaking work that has since gone into restoring their magnificence. What I did fail to digest here was the rather more hot 'political' issue over just who was going to pay for this fabulously expensive (money no object) work to be carried out.

In my ignorance, like most others at the time, I assumed that an insurance claim would be made. Good Lord, no. You do not think that the queen had her home insured do you? John Major, PM of the day was in a sticky spot over this one, there was understandable public outcry about the huge costs being met from the public purse whilst schools and hospitals were being closed down. The Queen herself was forced to step in, offering to open Buckingham Palace for the first time to the public, partly in order to fund the restorations herself.

Thank you Maam, most generous.

If you are by now forming the opinion that Richada is an anti-monarchist, then nothing could be further from the truth. It just makes me sad that events such as those surrounding the fire and being fleeced to see Windsor Castle makes the Royal Family appear so mean and out of touch with the times in which we, her subjects, live.

The rest of this review will put politics aside and as succinctly as is possible describe to you the visitor experience.

Leaving behind the Exhibition Centre you proceed in a clockwise direction past some lovely gardens beneath the Round Tower (neither open to the public) and through a gate from the Middle to the Upper Ward. This brings you to the start of the tour of the State Apartments, Gallery and Queen Mary's Dolls House.

Regrettably there was a queue for Queen Mary's Dolls House, helpfully they had signs saying "Queue 45 minutes from this point". We gave it a miss, estimating that we would be standing in a queue for over an hour to gain admission. At least if you do choose to queue there is a good view over the Thames Valley from this wide walkway constructed during the reign of Henry VIII. Fortunately, as we did, you can see the State Apartments via a separate entrance for which there was not a queue.

Thanks to the guidebook I can tell you that Queen Mary's Dolls House is just that, a dolls house housed in a glass case in a room to one side of the gallery. It is a splendid model house of 1/12th scale designed by famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and presented to Queen Mary in 1924. Every detail is authentic; it has electric lighting and a fully operational plumbing system. The tiny bottles of wine and Champaign are just that - the real thing!

Between the Dolls House room and the entrance to the State Apartments via the grand stair case is situated The Gallery. Quite the gloomiest art gallery I think that I have seen, it is situated in a large vaulted undercroft and houses a large collection of photographs and drawings from the Royal Collections.

Before climbing the (very) Grand Staircase you have to pass through the China Museum. Here is housed a huge collection, behind glass naturally, of china services from famous English and European manufacturers. Gratifyingly they are not just a showpiece, her Majesty actually gets them out and uses them on state occasions.

For my taste I think that the Grand Staircase was the highlight of Windsor Castle. Topped with a wooden lantern tower, it actually only dates from 1866, as grand entrances go, this one takes some beating!

At the top of the staircase you enter a room called The Grand Vestibule. Apart from a very good statue of Queen Victoria and the superb plasterwork fan vaulting on the ceiling this room is packed with various arms, mostly rifles, the prize trophy here being the actual bullet that killed Lord Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805. Not my kind of room this, never did like guns and bullets!

The first 'suite' of smaller rooms entered from the Vestibule date from King Charles II's time (1660-1685), although most of the art and furniture to be seen here whilst in period have been placed at a later date, mostly by Prince Albert in the mid 1800's. The King's Drawing Room and Bedchamber are particularly ornate and richly decorated, the amount of gold to be seen particularly in the bedchamber borders, frankly, on the tacky.

The tour continues through The King's Dressing Room and the King's Closet. Here lays my biggest beef with the whole experience here at Windsor Castle. All of these rooms which, by their very names, served an everyday working function, have been stripped of that function in order to place hugely valuable paintings and objects of art.

Klaudia, my 11 year old sister in law may be Polish but even she recognised the fact that the King has to wash, go to the toilet and bathe somewhere. She asked me a very simple question "where is the kibel?" (kibel toilet)

Nowhere in this tour did we see any sign of how the Royals actually LIVED day to day. In most other houses that we have visited Klaudia has enjoyed bathrooms, toilets and kitchens, none of which are displayed here.

The next suite of rooms are The Queen's suite, interconnecting to the aforementioned King's rooms. More lavish gold leaf and heavy red velvet wallpaper, how dull must have seemed everyday life compared to this. Living here could only be compared to watching the TV with the colour turned full up. Eventually all the colours start to run, there is so much of it you stop seeing the masterpieces on the wall, for my taste the whole lot is just far too lavish.

A room of considerable note is the King's Dining Room. Another Charles II period piece, this one is not a very large room, accentuated by the fact that it has no natural daylight other than that coming through from the adjacent Grand Staircase lantern tower. Every square inch of the ceiling here has been painted by Verrio, depicting a banquet of the gods. It is undeniably a superb piece of art on a grand scale.

Now we find ourselves in the Queen's Ballroom, dating mostly from William IV's time (1830-1837), as ballrooms go it is of surprisingly modest proportions, making the décor even more overbearing than it would otherwise be. The next two rooms are the Queen's Audience and Presence Chambers, again highly decorated and with 17th Century ceiling paintings by Verrio. In the Presence Chamber there is a superb carved fireplace surround dating from 1789 and incorporating a clock.

The Queen's Guard Chamber is yet another large room, packed to the rafters with guns. Of more personal interest there are also several thrones in here, all superbly carved and decorated.

Now we enter Windsor Castles "centrepiece" St Goerge's Hall. A colossal space over 180ft (55 metres) long, the new oak roof (constructed following the 1992 fire that destroyed the original) is the largest such roof constructed in the 20th Century. This is where the Queen hosts the State Banquets. For six centuries it has honoured the Order of the Garter and therefore could be said to be at the very centre of the English class system. All about you, on the ceiling and the walls you will see thousands of crests chosen by those knighted over the centuries. Regrettably the whole of this huge room has the feeling of being too new or "over-restored" . Maybe in 100 years it will blend in with the rest of the castle, for now it just does not feel "authentic" somehow.

Our tour is almost complete, we descend to the outer courtyard via the Lantern Lobby, the very place where the 1992 fire started. In winter months you can continue from here to see another, more intimate area of the castle known as the "Semi-State Rooms" These were created in the 1820's by George IV for his personal quarters. Judging by the photographs in the guide book this suite is also highly decorated although not quite on the scale of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, where George's excesses had really been allowed to run riot.

The Queen uses this suite of rooms for "non-state" entertaining.

We are pleased to breathe the outside air. The whole experience for my taste at least had been one of sheer over the top extravagance.

A very welcome contrast to the State Apartments is provided by St George's Chapel. Largely built between 1475 and 1484 in the reign of Edward IV, originally it had a wooden roof. The magnificent fan vaulted one that you can see today was added later, finally being completed by Henry VIII in 1528.

Bringing the history here at Windsor right up to date, in St George's Chapel there is a tiny side chapel (not open) where King George VI, his wife Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret are entombed.

Just as beautiful inside as it is out, I would have been happy to have seen this chapel and left the rest of the castle interiors out - after all, what you do not know cannot hurt you I suppose.

I may be perverse in my view, but we did make the comment whilst we still in the castle grounds, that in opening this place to the public the Royals are in a way rubbing our noses in their fantastic wealth.

Which really brings us right back to hospital closures and where we began.

No Richada will not be visiting Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle was a once in a lifetime experience - we cannot AFFORD to go back there!

Opening times: It is best to check the Information Line for this because the castle can be closed on state occasions etc. Call 020 7766 7304 for details and admission prices.