Historic Royal Palaces
Collections Care
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ABOVE: The Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace.

There are 12,000 items at Kensington Palace that must be salvaged or rescued in the event of a fire.

The palace's 16-strong salvage team can safely remove all objects from a room in an incredible six minutes. They use ladders that are 35 feet high to salvage many of the paintings, and they have to remove items very carefully from spaces as small as half a meter wide.

The salvage team's members spend 180 hours a year practicing the removal of artworks from Kensington Palace.

The smallest item to salvage at Kensington Palace is a button, and the largest is a painting--"Charles II on Horseback"--that is approximately 5 meters high.

Related article: Textile Conservation Studio

In this article:

General facts and figures

Tapestries at Hampton Court Palace

Salvage team at Kensington Palace

Also see:

Textile Conservation Studio at Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court Palace - 8-page travel article

Other London travel articles at Europe for Visitors