Portal:Berkshire/Selected article/4
Windsor Castle is a royal residence at Windsor in the English county of Berkshire. It is strongly associated with the English and succeeding British royal family, and embodies almost a millennium of architectural history.
The original castle was built in the 11th century, after the
Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror. Since the time of Henry I (who reigned 1100–1135), it has been used by the reigning monarch and is the longest-occupied palace in Europe. The castle's lavish early 19th-century state apartments were described by the art historian Hugh Roberts as "a superb and unrivalled sequence of rooms widely regarded as the finest and most complete expression of later Georgian taste". Inside the castle walls is the 15th-century St George's Chapel, considered by the historian John Martin Robinson to be "one of the supreme achievements of English Perpendicular Gothic
" design.
Originally designed to project
Elizabeth I
made increasing use of the castle as a royal court and centre for diplomatic entertainment.
Windsor Castle survived the tumultuous period of the
Second World War. An extensive restoration of several state rooms took place after the castle survived a fire in 1992. It is a popular tourist attraction, a venue for hosting state visits, and was the main residence of Elizabeth II from 2011 to 2022. (Full article...
)