Whitehall is a name and place synonymous with the British government. Amid its familiar landmarks — such as the Treasury, Foreign Office, Banqueting House and the gates of Downing Street — are several important buildings that continue to serve as offices and are rarely seen by the public. Just beyond Horse Guards, facing a jumble of Victorian frontages and recessed from the road behind high screen walls are three interlocking properties of this kind. They jointly manifest more than 400 years of naval history, and conceal some little-known interiors of great interest.
The youngest of the three, contrarily known as Old Admiralty, is the showiest. It is not seen from Whitehall at all, but forms one side of Horse Guards Parade beyond. Constructed during the 1890s and the early 1900s, it was a major addition to the much older pair of buildings that quietly spans the Whitehall frontage and stands on sites long associated with the Royal Navy.
The connection extends back to 1622, when the 1st Duke of Buckingham took up residence here in a property called Wallingford House, built upon the former timber yard of Whitehall Palace. Buckingham had been appointed Lord High Admiral in 1619 and brought his office with him to Whitehall. In 1628, the year of Buckingham’s death, Charles I converted the office of Admiral of England into a commission, with the control of the Royal Navy passing to the Board of Admiralty. A parliamentary act invested authority upon seven commissioners or Lords of the Admiralty Board. Their roles included a right to a residence and there were several early offices around Tower Hill.
Fig 2: Robert Adam’s screen with its flanking pavilions of 1761 close off the Ripley Building from Whitehall. The dome of the Old Admiralty building is distantly visible.
When the Buckingham lease expired in 1694, Wallingford House was demolished, presenting an opportunity for the construction of a new home for the Admiralty (which since the Restoration in 1660 had been operating from Duke Street, Westminster). Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to erect ‘a Sufficient Pyle of Building’, which he provided swiftly and to straightforward design. This was up and occupied by 1695, but was ultimately destined to last no more than three decades.
By 1723, the Admiralty, having purchased and cleared adjacent properties, demolished the Wren building, considering it in bad condition and failing to meet needs. Upon the now enlarged site rose the grand edifice we see today, three-sided around an open courtyard as designed by Thomas Ripley. What is today known as the Ripley Building was conceived as a piazza and was to comprise townhouse residences for the Admiralty Lords in the wings, with the central block providing space for offices and a fine board room. Entrance to the offices was through a giant Ionic portico (Fig 1), its pediment surmounted with the Admiralty badge in a carved cartouche.
The present proportions of the portico are a compromise. In the original scheme, a larger, wider pediment would have limited light to the upper windows. An 11th-hour rejig addressed this, but, as the stone columns were already cut, a proportional concession had to be made, squeezing the hefty columns into the narrower configuration we see today. When it was first completed, the portico was criticised and even mocked, but, since 1761, a screen closing it off from the street has softened its awkwardness (Fig 2).
View of the Admiralty, an engraving of 1818.
The screen is Robert Adam’s earliest work in London, a Doric arcade set between pedimented pavilions. In the pediments are carvings by Michael Henry Spang of the prow of a Roman ship and a British man-of-war. Beneath, triple niches were intended for statuary. Central to the screen composition is an entrance archway carved with panels of dolphins and surmounted by beautifully writhing hippo-campi. To either side are pedestrian gates. The present form of the screen, which respects Adam’s original design, actually dates back only to a restoration of 1923. That’s because, in 1827, the Duke of Clarence — later William IV, but then Lord High Admiral — smashed two side entrances through the structure to create more convenient access for his carriage.
Beyond the screen, the official residence of the First Lord of the Admiralty was in the left-hand corner of the internal courtyard. By 1781, this accommodation was already considered insufficient. A proposal for adding ‘a few rooms’ behind was approved by the Prime Minister and Treasury. Properties immediately beside it on Whitehall were purchased in 1785 by the Naval Commissioners, then cleared to make way for an expanded Admiralty House.
Fig 3: The 1780s inner hall of Admiralty House with its stove in the form of an orna-mented columna rostra, a Roman naval victory column.
The project, undertaken by Samuel Pepys Cockerell, grew rapidly in ambition. What had begun as a proposal to create a few new rooms gradually transformed into the creation of a grand aristocratic mansion, comprising three main storeys with basement and attic. Cockerell was a student of Sir Robert Taylor, from whom he took on the role of surveyor to the Admiralty. As Taylor resided at Spring Gardens just to the rear of this site, he would certainly have been involved in his protégé’s project, although he died shortly before the building was complete by Christmas 1788.
As the concept had begun life as a rear extension, the approach to the enlarged Admiralty House remained via the existing Ripley courtyard. This left what would have been a large forecourt area between Cockerell’s new building and the street free for a detached, double-height kitchen. A high, blind wall topped with formidable iron railings and scrolled lamp brackets conceals this structure from Whitehall. Despite being hidden, the street façade of Admiralty House is well balanced and polite, of golden stock brick with simple stone dressing. Its centrepiece is a Venetian window framed within a semicircular recess.
The entrance to Cockerell’s mansion remains through Ripley’s front door. Only as the visitor enters the inner hall does the building assume the grandeur of an official residence, with a vaulted ceilingand fluted Doric pilasters and columns (Fig 3). Facing the visitor as they enter is an oversized cast-iron stove in the form of a columna rostra, a Roman victory column ornamented with the prows of ships and celebrating a naval engagement.
Fig 4: The imperial stair at Admiralty House.
At the far end of the inner hall is an arch that frames a magnificent stair. It rises away from the visitor, then divides into paired return flights transcribing a graceful horseshoe curve. This imperial stone staircase maximises elegance in compact perfection (Fig 4); three floors of restrained wrought-iron balustrade and balconied landings, with a glazed dome sailing overhead.
From the inner hall, four grand rooms open to form a suite for formal entertainment. The function of these spaces has changed over the centuries, but today they are named the State Dining Room, Drawing Room, Music Room and Band Room. On the floor above is a matching circuit of rooms intended as the First Lord’s private apartments. Services and stairs are neatly tucked away to resolve this compact plan.
Ornate vaulted and finely decorated ceilings cover the rooms facing Whitehall and magnificent marble chimneypieces feature prominently throughout. Cockerell sourced most of these from other great houses, including Egremont House in Piccadilly, York House on the Strand and a property called Wricklemarsh in Blackheath. Unfortunately, as the names and functions of rooms have changed, it has become impossible to say with absolute confidence which fireplace came from which house. Cockerell also purchased and re-used doors and doorcases, columns, even second-hand window shutters. Presumably, he was trying to save money in the light of the spiralling costs of the project as a whole.
Fig 5: The Boardroom. The ceiling and purpose-built table and chairs date to the 1780s. Over the fireplace are earlier carvings and a fine anemoscope.
Such space as was freed up in the Ripley Building by Cockerell’s expansion of Admiralty House was quietly annexed and converted into offices. Of this working part of the building, the Boardroom where the Lords of the Admiralty met was always the standout interior (Fig 5). With its carved decoration and panelling, Corinthian pilasters and portraits, the first impression is of an interior that has served unchanged as the nerve centre of British naval history from the age of Nelson to Churchill and beyond. This is not the case.
The panelling pre-dates the room, having been salvaged from the Wren building on the site that was demolished in 1723. The ceiling, meanwhile, was inserted by Cockerell in 1786 and the same pattern of interlacing circles and rosettes is found next door in the First Lord’s bedroom. Over the fireplace is an anemoscope, or wind-dial, framed by magnificent pearwood festoons attributed to Grinling Gibbons. The incised date of 1695 supports this. These include nautical instruments — ring dials, astrolabes, quadrants and so on — rendered in marvellous detail. Along the top of the chimneypiece is a frothy band of shells, fish, fruit, flowers, bay, oak and palm leaves (Fig 6). In the centre, Fame’s trumpets are combined with a royal crown, sword, sceptre and anchor and the motif of an eye in a sunburst.
Fig 6: A detail of the exactingly reproduced naval instruments around the fire-place. Made for Sir Christopher Wren’s building, probably by Grinling Gibbons, the carving is dated 1695.
The wind-dial, dated between 1707–14, is stylistically linked to another in the King’s Gallery at Kensington Palace, designed by cartographer Robert Morden with mechanism by Thomas Tompion. British seas and adjacent coastlines from Norway to the Pyrenees are mapped out, as ships, whales and allegorical figures shiver among the waves.
Not only, then, are the elements of this splendid room of different dates, but they have been demonstrably reconfigured over time. In the early 19th century, the wind-dial, for example, was located on an end wall (to the north) and built in with bookcases. The carvings, meanwhile, were assembled at the opposite end of the room and a series of pull-down maps installed above the fireplace. The current organisation of the interior broadly dates from 1847, after which two full-length portraits were introduced; Lord Nelson by Guzzardi, acquired by the Admiralty in 1848, and William IV by Beechey, purchased in 1894.
The mighty board table is most likely of 1789 and clearly bespoke. The semi-circular cutaway at one end is made, not for accommodating the corpulence of an undisclosed First Lord as sometimes imagined (and as the arrangement within it of a particularly magnificent chair implies). Rather, it was designed for the hard-working secretaries, to allow better access to the inevitable sea of paperwork that they needed to manage.
Explosions have twice near-destroyed this room; once from a Fenian bomb in 1885 and then again during the Blitz in the 1940s. That the repair has in each instance constituted faithful reinstatement indicates the great historical importance attached to this space.
In 1964, the Labour government merged the Board of Admiralty with the Air Ministry and War Office to create the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which relocated to the present MoD across Whitehall. Thereafter, the buildings have been used by other Government departments and the Boardroom has become a quiet survival. Shown on building tours and occasionally used for meetings, it has, over the decades, taken on the revered air of a museum piece; library-quiet and with the reassuringly warm aroma of dust and beeswax. Having not outwardly changed in nearly 180 years, this is no surprise and makes the evocative interior all the more delightful.
This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.