We almost waited too long to go to see this castle and world famous gardens. The day we'd planned to go, the rising river caused the Thames Cruise Boat to cancel trips. But a couple of trains got us there just fine. (It was from the road next to the castle that we took those two pictures of the high river.) And, after all, it turned out to be a lovely day.
The castle, which was first the home to Henry VIII, is magnificent inside and out, but our favorite parts of the tour were where we learned about how the working people and servants who supported it lived and worked. Also, the sixty acres of formal gardens really make Hampton Court a must-see. We are glad we didn't miss it.
Good old Henry took over a courtier's country home and transformed it into a magnificent palace. It was his summer home. A chapel dating from this era is still in use (for anyone now). Self-guided tours take you there and into the Tudor-era royal rooms, public and private.
The only part of the inside tours where you're allowed to take pictures is in the reconstructed Tudor kitchens and other work areas. There are great stories about how many "support persons" the royal court needed -- several hundred -- and about how the food was ordered and prepared. Anyone could show up at the castle, and assuming they were reasonably well dressed, could request to "say hello" to their ruler. They could also stay for dinner, mostly meat and bread, but the records show that they did buy a lot veggies also. The different European kings tried to outdo each other with their hospitality. This castle fed as many as one thousand people each day. Food historians actually cook in the same way they did back then. You can smell food cooking. The picture of the pies show how they baked a lot of meat and vegetable dishes--the shells were simply flour and water paste, and were discarded after the food was removed. The huge boiling pots looked almost like the ones in today's institutional kitchens, except these were heated by wood fire underneath. They also had six huge fireplaces with several spits placed before each one--it was very warm with only one fire going--it must have been almost unbearable with all of them roaring away.
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After the Tudor era, sometime in the 1600s, the royals of the time, King William III and Mary II, commissioned Christopher Wren to design a remodel of the palace. But the plan was only partly completed (the queen died of smallpox and the king lost interest in the project). So half the palace remains Tudor and the other half all that elegant baroque style of the Georgian era, that's so pleasant to look at (since somebody else has to dust). So you really get to see two palaces for the price of one, assuming your feet hold out. The gardens were actually put in during this time. Earlier, the land was mostly used for hunting.
Art works from the times are displayed and there are furnished public and private rooms of the royals, with the self-guided audio tour giving you some good stories. 
Again -- you can't take very many pictures of the castle insides, but (if you are us) you can make up for it in the beautiful gardens. We took a land-train around the periphery and then walked until we couldn't any more. There's a pretty cool maze, where we managed not to get lost, and the Guinness-certified largest vine in the world -- a grapevine. (There are gardeners just to take care of it.)
Here are some garden pictures:
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