The King's Gallery, Buckingham Palace

The ground beneath your feet holds a history far more turbulent than its current quiet purpose suggests. Before it became a place for viewing art, this site was once a private chapel commissioned by Queen Victoria in eighteen forty-three. That building had a previous life as a conservatory, designed by the architect John Nash as an elegant Ionic temple. During the Second World War, a German air raid in nineteen forty caused devastating damage to the chapel, leaving the structure in ruins for years. It remained a scarred site until Queen Elizabeth the Second and the Duke of Edinburgh envisioned a new future for the space, leading to its transformation into a public gallery that opened in nineteen sixty-two.