Look at these two enormous matching buildings with the two matching domes, facing each other across a wide gap. This is the Old Royal Naval College, designed by Christopher Wren — the Saint Paul's man — as a grand home for retired and injured sailors. And there's a reason it's split into two halves with a big empty avenue running straight up the middle. That reason is that a queen wanted to keep her view.
Behind this whole complex, up the slope, is a smaller white house called the Queen's House, and Queen Mary loved the view from it, straight down to the river. When they proposed building this massive sailors' hospital in front of it, she had one condition: the new building must not block her sightline to the water. So Wren, one of the greatest architects in history, was handed the most magnificent commission of his career and told he could NOT put a building where the building obviously wanted to go. His solution was to take his grand design and slice it clean in two, leaving a wide
gap straight down the centre so the queen's view could sail right through the middle. Britain's most spectacular riverside baroque is arranged around an empty strip of nothing, because a queen didn't want to lose sight of some boats. The view won. The view always wins.
There was a palace here before this one, and it was a big deal. Right on this spot stood the Palace of Placentia, the Tudor pleas
