Buckingham Palace has unveiled new lifts as part of its ongoing £369 million refurbishment program, posting a video on the Royal Family’s official X account on August 3 showing the newly installed accessibility improvements, per GB News’s confirmed reporting. The lifts are part of the Reservicing Programme that began in 2017 and is nearing completion next year. When it finishes, King Charles will remain at Clarence House, which he has used as his primary London residence since before he became King and which he apparently prefers to the 775-room building his mother lived in for 70 years. He will not be moving in.
Prince William, who will eventually inherit the Palace and the obligation to decide what to do with it, has “displayed little to no enthusiasm for making Buckingham Palace his permanent home when he eventually succeeds his father on the throne,” per GB News’s confirmed analysis. His reluctance raises the prospect, now being discussed openly in royal coverage, that Buckingham Palace, the building that represents the British monarchy to approximately every person in the world who has ever seen a photograph of it, may never again function as a family residence. It would instead serve as a ceremonial and administrative hub, which is what it has been doing anyway for most of the past decade while Charles lived at Clarence House and William lived at Kensington Palace.
The £369 million has been spent on replacing the building’s water, gas, and electrical systems, which are described as having been on the verge of catastrophic failure and which have now been updated, along with the new lifts, new accessibility features, and general restoration of a building that is 185 years old in its current form and considerably older in its foundations. The new lifts will be useful for the tourists who visit the State Rooms during summer openings and for the staff who work in the building. They will be less useful to the two successive monarchs who have decided they would rather live somewhere else.
The renovation cost £369 million. The King is staying at Clarence House. The future King has little enthusiasm for moving in. The lifts are excellent.
When the monarchy spends £369 million renovating a palace that neither the current King nor the future King wants to live in, what exactly is the building for?
Sources
GB News: Buckingham Palace unveils new lifts as £369m refurbishment nears completion
