HAMPTON COURT PALACE

Hampton Court Palace, Through a 12mm Lens

For years, Hampton Court was where I went to escape my own studio. I run a busy commercial operation nearby, and on the days that got too much — too many products, too many deadlines, too much studio strobe — I'd take a membership card and just go and wander the palace for an hour. Fresh air, mostly. I wasn't there to work.

Now the heritage side of the business has me photographing places like this properly, and it's changed how I see the palace entirely. I still can't walk round it without a camera making its way into my hand, but these days I actually look — at the joinery, the light, the state of the plaster — rather than just letting it wash over me on a lunch break.

I love it in the obvious way — the roofline, the brick, the sheer nerve of the place — but just as much I love what's around it. Home Park and Bushy Park still have deer moving through them the way they have for five hundred years, because that's exactly what they're there for. Henry VIII hunted that ground. I go out there with a long lens for the deer and the birds, and I can't help thinking about him doing more or less the same walk, minus the camera and plus a horse and a few dozen dogs. That's really what this place does to me — I can't just look at it, I end up standing there working out what it must have actually been like.

Nowhere does that to me harder than the Chapel Royal ceiling. Henry put it in during the 1530s — blue and gold, gilded pendant bosses catching whatever light gets down to them. It's not a big room. You don't back up for a wide shot, you stand under it with your neck craned, doing the maths on how much of that colour is really there. It's still a working chapel, over 450 years of continuous use, so you catch it when you can, not when you fancy. Archbishop Cranmer stood under that same ceiling in 1540 to hand Henry the letter accusing Catherine Howard of misconduct. Kings and queens never even sat in the body of the chapel — they watched from a private pew on the floor above, at a careful distance from everyone else. Every time I frame that ceiling from underneath, I'm aware I'm standing exactly where the congregation stood, looking up at Henry looking down.

If the chapel is where I stand still, the Great Hall is where I go wide. Built between 1532 and 1535, it's enormous, dim, and built entirely to intimidate — Henry wanted a hammerbeam roof like the great medieval halls before his, oak beams and carved faces glowering down (nobody's sure what the "Eavesdroppers" carved into it were actually for, though I like to think they were there to shame the gossips). This is a 12mm room, and nothing shorter gets the roof, the tapestries and the height of the place into one frame without me backing through a wall. Converging verticals, low light, a tripod ban in places — it's a slow, deliberate shoot, not a walk-and-click one. Look up and you can still find Anne Boleyn's falcon badge and her initials tangled with Henry's, carved in by 1533, aged badly within a couple of years given what came next. The tapestries tell Abraham's story, woven in Brussels, first hung in 1546, and after Charles I's execution they were valued as the single most prized item in the whole royal collection. All of that in one room, and my lens is still the limiting factor.

Honestly, if I had a genuine time machine and one trip to spend, I wouldn't go anywhere near the coronations or the executions everyone else would pick. I'd want a quiet Tuesday in the mid-1500s, standing somewhere unremarkable in that palace with a camera I could keep out of sight, just watching how the place actually worked — how the light moved through those rooms before electricity ruined the mystery of it, what the Great Hall sounded like full of eight hundred people eating, what that Chapel Royal ceiling looked like fresh instead of five hundred years faded. I'd almost certainly get burned as a heretic for the camera alone, which feels like a fair trade for the photos.

Funny how it works — I spent years walking round this place on my breaks without really seeing it, and it took picking up a camera for the heritage side of the business to actually pay attention. If you've got a building — or a stretch of parkland — that deserves that kind of attention, I'd love to hear about it.