Hampton Court Palace Guide: Tickets, Hours & Getting There

Hampton Court Palace is a Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) site best known as Henry VIII's palace, combining Tudor architecture with a later Baroque wing. It's genuinely outside central London — the palace sits in Zone 6, reached from London Waterloo by South Western Railway (about every 30 minutes) or, in summer only, by a multi-hour public riverboat. Don't schedule this on the same day as central-London sightseeing without allowing a realistic 1-hour-plus one-way travel time each way.

Pricing splits by day of the week: off-peak (weekday) Adult admission is £29.00, while peak (weekend/bank holiday) Adult admission is £32.00, with senior/student and child rates similarly tiered. These prices are valid until 27 November 2026.

Advance online booking is recommended, and it's effectively required if you want one of the limited-availability £1 concessionary tickets — a genuinely useful detail for budget-conscious visitors that's easy to miss if you only look at standard pricing.

Hampton Court Palace is also included, alongside Kensington Palace and the Tower of London, in the Historic Royal Palaces annual membership (from £65) — a repeat-visit product rather than a short-stay sightseeing pass.

Hampton Court Palace was begun in 1515 by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII's powerful Lord Chancellor, who built it as a grand residence for himself before giving it to the king in 1529 in an unsuccessful bid to regain royal favour. Henry VIII then expanded it substantially, adding the Great Hall and the Tudor kitchens that still survive today.

Two centuries later, William III and Mary II commissioned Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild much of the palace in the fashionable Baroque style, intending to rival Versailles. Funding ran out before the transformation was complete, which is why Hampton Court today presents a striking architectural split — Tudor state rooms and courtyards alongside a Baroque wing — rather than a single unified style.