Banqueting House

Lonely Planet review

This is the only surviving part of the Tudor Whitehall Palace, which once stretched most of the way down Whitehall, but was burned down in 1698. It was designed as England's first purely Renaissance building by Inigo Jones after he returned from Italy, and looked like no other structure in the country at the time. The English hated it for more than a century.

A bust outside commemorates 30 January 1649, when Charles I, accused of treason by Cromwell after the Civil War, was executed on a scaffold built against a 1st-floor window here. When the royals were reinstated with Charles II, it inevitably became something of a royalist shrine, although its ceremonial functions faded in time and it was used as the Chapel Royal from the 18th century.

It is still occasionally used for state banquets and concerts, but fortunately you don't have to be on the royal A-list to visit. In a huge, virtually unfurnished hall on the first floor there are nine ceiling panels painted by Rubens. They were commissioned by Charles I and depict the 'divine right' of kings.