Buckingham Palace May Be the Most Famous Home in the World. So, Why Doesn’t King Charles Live There?

Buckingham Palace is arguably the most famous home in the world. When the sovereign is in residence, the royal standard flies high over the stately palace. The site of countless royal births, deaths, christenings and familial balcony appearances, it has been the official London home of the monarch since 1837. But in the past few years, the only residents appear to be one royal couple, some staff, and a handful of ghosts.

One person currently not living at “Buck House” is King Charles III, but he has a good excuse: The palace is currently undergoing a massive $466 million renovation. However, this is probably a relief. “I know he is no fan of ‘the big house,’ as he calls the palace,” an insider told The Sunday Times. “He doesn’t see it as a viable future home or a house that’s fit for purpose in the modern world. He feels its upkeep, both from a cost and environmental perspective, is not sustainable.”

Royal historian Ingrid Seward agrees. “They [Charles and Camilla] would much rather stay at Clarence House,” she told Newsweek in 2023. “None of the royals liked living at BP. It’s vast and impersonal. It is an official residence, not a home.”

Boasting 775 rooms, 52 royal and guest bedrooms and 188 staff bedrooms, living in Buckingham Palace has been likened to “living above the shop,” staying in a giant hotel or “camping in a museum.” According to Andrew Morton’s Inside Buckingham Palace, Queen Mary herself got lost for three hours while exploring all the nooks and crannies of her new home. It is so vast, intruders have been a problem since Queen Victoria’s day, culminating in Michael Fagan accosting Queen Elizabeth II in her bedroom in 1982.

While the private royal apartments run along the northwest flank of the building, the rest of Buckingham Palace is a giant office building, seasonal museum, and events space. According to the official royal website, 50,000 people visit each year, enjoying state banquets, receptions, and garden parties. Outside the gates, the Mall is packed with tourists. “I should put a dummy of myself inside my windows,” Prince Andrew once said, reportedly.

“What happens on the other side of a wall is always an intriguing question, and when the wall is in the middle of London and encloses the garden of Buckingham Palace, it is positively tantalizing,” the late Prince Philip once noted, per Morton.

Royals cloistered in the palace have been equally intrigued by the lookie-loos outside the gates. According to historian Sally Bedell Smith, as a child, the future Queen Elizabeth II spent hours gazing out the windows of her BP bedroom, watching the world pass by.

“I used to wonder what they were doing and where they were all going, and what they thought about the outside palace,” recalled.

But the queen had plenty of people to learn about within the small village of Buckingham Palace. She reportedly loved hearing about which courtier got too drunk at the now closed staff bar, or what backstairs romances were going on under her nose. But with her death, the palace is straying further and further from what it was initially meant to be—a cozy family home.

In 1703, the powerful politician and military officer John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, completed construction of Buckingham House, his magnificent new home on the Mall in London. It was built next to St. James’s Palace, the primary residence of Queen Anne, and it dwarfed her outdated palace.

In 1762, King George III bought Buckingham House as a gift for his new wife, Queen Charlotte. “That George, usually so careful with money, was prepared to lay out so much to secure the property was a measure of its importance to him,” Janice Hadlow writes in A Royal Experiment: The Private Life of King George III. “‘Buck House,’ he explained to his advisor and tutor, John Stuart, Earl of Bute, ‘is not meant for a palace, but as a retreat.’”

The home soon became Charlotte’s respite from the intriguing court at St. James’s Palace. “From the very beginning, the new palace was always strongly associated with Charlotte and her taste, and it was soon known as the Queen’s House, a name it was to keep for the next 50 years,” Hadlow writes.

When her profligate and extravagant son King George IV ascended the throne in 1820, he hired famed architect John Nash to radically expand Buck House. However, associating it with his restricted childhood, he never lived there. When his sailor brother King William IV ascended the throne in 1830, he so loathed the newly expanded house that he tried to off-load it on Parliament when its building burned in 1834. He also never moved in, preferring to live in his longtime home of Clarence House.

It was not just the king who disliked the imposing, cavernous palace. “I never saw anything that might be pronounced a more total failure in every respect, and for my own part, I would not live there rent-free,” a German visitor wrote, per Patricia Wright’s Strange History of Buckingham Palace. “I should vex myself all day long with the fantastic mixture of every style and decoration, the absence of all taste, the total want of measure and proportion.”

Buckingham Palace finally became the official London residence of the monarch in 1837 when a young Queen Victoria ascended the throne. Though initially very pleased in the palace, especially when her children were little and lively, she eventually loathed it. “Victoria would grow to hate Buckingham Palace, with its smoking chimneys, poor ventilation, and smells of rotting food, and she would feel oppressed by the dank air and crowds of London—as well as the soot that fell in black flakes on her gardens,” Sally Bedell Smith writes in Elizabeth the Queen.

Indeed, according to Andrew Morton, she was so rarely there in the last years of her reign, one joker hung a “For Sale” sign on the palace gates.

Almost every other future sovereign moved into Buckingham Palace out of duty alone. Edward VII described Buckingham Palace as “a sepulchre.”

His grandson King Edward VIII (the future Duke of Windsor) wrote, per historian Edna Healey, “This vast building with its stately rooms and endless corridors and passages…seemed pervaded by a curious, musty smell that still assails me whenever I enter its portals. I was never happy there.”

According to Tom Quinn’s Yes, Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants, live-in staff had many of the same complaints their employers had. “Oh, heavens, it was cold and the palace was so huge that it took me weeks, helped by another girl even to work out how to get back to my room each evening,” maid Grace Williams recalled. “I was always getting lost. My room, which I shared, seemed miles away from the kitchen.”

Honored guests were also quite surprised by how uncomfortable their rooms were. “When Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt stayed at Buckingham Palace in 1942, in spite of being given the queen’s own bedroom, she instantly joined the club of earlier, 19th-century palace visitors by finding it intolerably Spartan,” Patricia Wright writes. “The windows were boarded up except for minute mica panels in the middle, through which a few rays of light reluctantly filtered. The bitter draughts in her huge royal bedchamber seemed only to be increased by the single, small electric fire allowed there.”

After Edward’s abdication in 1936, his dutiful brother King George VI and his young family moved into the palace, which he called an “icebox.” But for his daughters Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, the palace was initially a wonderland, filled with plenty of places to explore and play. “It was as if the place had been dead for years and had suddenly come alive,” one servant recalled, per Morton.

But according to some reports, Elizabeth II was also reluctant to leave her beloved newlywed home of Clarence House after her father’s death in 1952. “According to legend,” Bedell Smith writes, “it was only when her prime minister, Winston Churchill, put his foot down that she gave up hope of staying in Clarence House.”

The queen gave birth to King Charles III, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward at Buckingham Palace (Princess Anne was born in Clarence House). They also brought occasional mayhem, particularly Prince Andrew.

“He was fond of practical jokes, hiding knives and forks when a footman was laying the table, tying the shoelaces of sentries… turning the aerial at Buckingham Palace so she could not watch the racing at Sandown and putting washing-up liquid in the palace pool,” Andrew Lownie writes in Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York. “A valuable silver tray was used as a toboggan for sliding down Palace stairs, and he would pedal furiously up and down the long red-carpeted corridors on his tricycle.”

The queen’s beloved corgis also had free reign of the palace. According to Morton, Elizabeth was on a moonlit stroll when a night guardsman called “Who goes there?”

“One queen, one footman, and eight corgis,” Elizabeth wryly replied.

From the 1980s to mid-2000s, Buckingham Palace, then with a population of around 300, was the liveliest it’s ever been. Princess Diana lived there during her engagement, breaking the code of upstairs/downstairs by going to the kitchen to gossip with the staff. In addition to the apartments of the queen and Prince Philip, Princess Anne, Prince Edward, and Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson all had small apartments in Buckingham Palace. One clerk was shocked to see the queen running down a corridor after a young Prince William, when the queen breathlessly called out, “Don’t worry, one day this will happen to you!”

In 2003, a photojournalist named Ryan Perry shocked the country when he obtained a job as a footman and moved into a second-floor room in Buckingham Palace, near the queen’s rooms. His subsequent exposé revealed the rather faded, old-fashioned family suites.

The queen’s breakfast room seemed stuck in a time warp, silver spoons laid next to Tupperware filled with cornflakes. Prince Andrew’s home was covered in precisely placed teddy bears and cushions reading “Eat, sleep and re-marry” and “Before you meet your real prince you have to kiss a lot of frogs.”

Princess Anne’s apartment was covered with books, paperwork, and knickknacks, and a bowl that at all times was expected to include “one very ripe—indeed black—banana, and a very soft, ripe kiwi fruit.” Prince Edward and his wife Sophie’s apartment was said to be clean and modern, with a yellow scheme. Over the toilet was a cartoon of the queen addressing a group of penguins, with the caption: “All agreed? I’ll file a complaint to the Press Council.”

There was not much mingling among the royal family members, though, leaving one wag to note it was much like a boarding school during summer holidays.

The royal siblings also had fewer and fewer neighbors. As early as the 1990s, there was a concerted effort to move staff out of the palace. “We’ve spent a lot of money so that staff don’t live in the building,” one staffer told Morton. “The majority go ‘home.’ They leave here, they go out the door, they walk down the street, and they reenter their homes. And it is very helpful from a psychological perspective. They’re not so institutionalized.”

By the mid-2010s, it was clear that Buckingham Palace was becoming less and less hospitable. President Barack Obama had an encounter with a mouse on a state visit, asbestos was everywhere, buckets were prevalent due to leaks, and falling masonry narrowly missed Princess Anne’s head. In 2017, the current renovation project began, which will include extensive renovations of the north wing, which houses the royal apartments.

In 2020, Queen Elizabeth herself moved permanently to her beloved Windsor Castle. “It’s no surprise the queen has moved to Windsor, she’s never really liked the palace, it’s always been the office to the queen,” former royal chef Darren McGrady said at the time. “The queen would always be whizzing off back to Windsor Castle, she can’t wait to get back there. She loves it there, so it’s no surprise she’s moved there permanently.”

Her family has trickled away as well. Princess Anne now has a London pied-a-terre at St. James’s Palace (though she much prefers Gatcombe Park, her country estate). In 2023, it was reported that Prince Andrew was asked to leave his Buckingham Palace office and apartment. While the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh (staff favorites) reportedly still have rooms, they can usually be found at Bagshot Park in Surrey.

Although King Charles III’s official line is that he will move into Buckingham Palace after the project is completed in 2027, his alleged aversion to the building, and his illness make that seem unlikely. Prince William and Kate Middleton’s decision to make Forest Lodge in Windsor their “forever home” further calls into question the palace’s future. According to reports, Prince William may hope to turn the palace purely into the “Monarchy HQ,” and abandon it as a royal home.

If this trend continues, Buckingham Palace’s only residents may soon be its reported ghosts, which include a moaning, enchained monk, Major John Gwynne, who died by suicide in the palace in 1915, and Queen Victoria, who has been spotted in her widow’s weeds.