The first half of the sixth – and final – season of The Crown drops on Netflix today, and there are a whole host of royal properties that will appear.
Season five ended with Prince Charles (now King Charles III in real life) and Princess Diana’s divorce, prompting a rearrangement of royal households.
The final instalment will pick up in 1997, with Princess Diana about to head off on holiday with Dodi Al-Fayed, Tony Blair as Prime Minister, and Queen Elizabeth II facing the challenges of bringing the monarchy into a new millennium.
But where did all the drama take place? And what has happened to the grand houses and palaces since the late nineties and early noughties events shown on screen?
Princess Diana: Kensington Palace
Elizabeth Debicki will reprise her role as Diana Princes of Wales for The Crown’s final season.
Following her divorce being finalised in 1996, Diana remained in apartments eight and nine of Kensington Palace in west London.
Built In 1605, Kensington Palace has been a residence for the British royal family since 1689.
Determined to begin a new life after her separation from the heir to the throne, Diana redecorated her home accordingly.
“Her first decision was to throw out the mahogany double bed she had slept in at Kensington Palace since her wedding eleven years before,” Andrew Morton wrote in Diana: Her True Story.
“Then she had the bedroom painted and new locks fitted, and changed her private telephone number. Her new life alone had begun.”
Diana reportedly added a more feminine touch, choosing shades of yellow and pastel pink for the revamp.
Morton recorded that Diana displayed silk scatter cushions embroidered with slogans such as ‘good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere’ and ‘you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince’.
After the divorce she had to vacate her office space in St James’s Palace, setting up a new one at her home in Kensington Palace.
There is no record of how much she spent on the overhaul, but her divorce settlement with Charles was a reported £17 million, plus an annual payment of £400,000.
After her untimely death in 1997, a statue of Princess Diana was erected in the Sunken Garden of the palace grounds.
Apartments 8 and 9 are now occupied by royal staff.
Prince Charles: Highgrove House, Clarence House
After the divorce, Prince Charles – played by Dominic West in this season of the Netflix show – remained principally at his beloved Highgrove House in Gloucestershire.
The 18th-century mansion was the backdrop for much of the tension between the Prince of Wales and his ex-wife in earlier seasons of The Crown.
Diana did not enjoy staying at the property, but the countryside retreat was a paradise for the future King’s pursuit of organic gardening.
Highgrove House is still favoured by the monarchy and is now the official private residence of King Charles III and the Queen Consort.
It is currently undergoing a 10-year renovation plan that is due to complete in 2027.
Clarence House on The Mall in the City of Westminster was Charles’ London residence from 2003 and remains the official London resi.
Designed by architect John Nash and completed in 1827, Clarence House was where Queen Elizabeth II lived while she was still just a Princess after her marriage to Prince Philip. The couple moved in in 1947 and updated the electrics, heat and hot water systems.
The Queen Mother (portrayed by Marcia Warren in The Crown) lived there until she died in 2002 and oversaw her own renovations of the house with her own porcelain and painting collections.
Clarence House underwent a reported £5 million refurbishment, paid for by the British government and aided by the late interior designer Robert Kime, before Prince Charles moved in.
Prince Harry also had a room in the house and it was his official residence from 2002 until 2012. In his memoir Spare he wrote that Camilla turned his room into a dressing room when he moved out.
Buckingham Palace may now be the King's official residence but Clarence House is still his home base, with Camilla understood to have hosted Christmas there in 2022.
Camilla Parker-Bowles: Ray Mills House
Future Queen Consort Camilla Parker-Bowles will be played once more by Olivia Williams.
According to the timeline of The Crown’s sixth season, she was living in Ray Mills House in Wiltshire.
Camilla bought the Grade-II listed property for a reported £850,000 in 1996 after her divorce a few years earlier.
With its outdoor swimming pool and stables for horses, the house was ideal for her love of country pursuits – something Camilla shared with her secret lover Prince Charles.
Despite being in another county, Ray Mills House is just a short drive away from Highgrove House.
Camilla moved in with Charles at Highgrove in 2003, but she retains Ray Mills House as her personal bolt hole.
The pair married in 2005, an event that might well be recreated in the closing episodes of the final season of The Crown.
The Queen and Prince Philip: Buckingham Palace, Sandringham, Windsor, and Balmoral
The Crown’s sixth season will see the 20th century drawing to a close and Queen Elizabeth II facing more heartbreak.
Imelda Staunton will portray the late monarch as she handles the death of her former daughter-in-law in 1997, followed by the twin losses of her sister and mother in 2002.
Buckingham Palace was, of course, her official London residence throughout her reign.
The Crown’s production designer Martin Childs said he even visited the palace as a tourist in order to get the sets right for filming.
A 10-year-long refit of the palace to the tune of £369 million began in 2016, but during the TV show’s timeline the Queen was having to contend with her home’s ancient and crumbling plumbing and electrical system, which had not been updated since the Fifties.
A report into the condition of the Palace noted: "the building’s infrastructure is now in urgent need of an overhaul to avoid the very real danger of catastrophic failure leading to fire or flood."
Not much is known about the decor of the family's private rooms but a Mirror journalist working undercover as a footman at Buckingham Palace in 2003 caused a stir with photos of the Queen's breakfast table, laid with a thick white tablecloth and crested napkin, silver cutlery, a small radio, fruit and flowers in silver bowls, and, famously, cornflakes in Tupperware containers.
Balmoral will certainly star in this season of The Crown.
The trailer featured a haunting shot of the darkened Scottish estate lighting up as a phone rings, presumably bringing news of Diana’s death in Paris.
The Royal family, including Prince William and Prince Harry, were staying at the Aberdeenshire residence for the summer when the Princess died.
Queen Elizabeth II came under scrutiny for not immediately returning to London after the tragedy, although five days later she addressed the grieving nation from Buckingham Palace.
It remains to be seen whether Sandringham - the Queen’s favoured residence for Christmas – will appear in the sixth season. It featured in season four, with Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk standing in for the Norfolk Estate.
Windsor Castle may also appear, but the Queen did not make it her main residence until 2011.
Prince William and Prince Harry: Kensington Palace, Eton, St Andrews
The princes will be young teenagers when the sixth season of The Crown begins.
Young Prince William will be played by Rufus Kampa in the earlier episodes, before Ed McVey takes on the role. Fflyn Edwards plays a young Prince Harry, while Luther Ford has been cast as an older version.
Kensington Palace was the childhood home of the Princes, and by 1997 William was at boarding school at Eton, with Harry joining him in 1998.
The Crown will follow Prince William to St Andrew’s University, where he lived in St Salvator’s Hall of residence during his first year.
It was at university that William met his future Queen, Kate Middleton, who will be portrayed by newcomer Meg Bellamy in the Netflix show.
William and Kate moved into a student flatshare with two friends at 13A Hope Street during their studies, where they each paid £100 a week in rent.
Their landlady, Charlotte Smith, revealed that she had had a "no boys" policy at the time and nearly did not let Prince William and his fellow former Etonian housemate Fergus Boyd live there but was eventually persuaded once she found out the identity of the prospective tenant.
A recent advert shows the two-storey house now has an advertised rent of £3,875 per month, payable quarterly in advance.
Now married, the royal couple lived in 21-room apartment 1A of Kensington Palace following a renovation costing a reported £4.5 ahead of the arrival of their first child. Last year they then followed in the footsteps of countless young families by relocating to the Home Counties, installing themselves in Adelaide Cottage on the Windsor Estate.
The four-bedroom house was modernised in 2015 and is close to Windsor Castle, the 900-year-old fortress where the Queen relocated shortly before her death.
Princess Margaret: Kensington Palace, Les Jolies Eaux
Princess Margaret, who died in 2002, will appear in at least some episodes of The Crown’s sixth season.
Lesley Manville, who played the Queen’s sister in season five, will reprise her role.
Diana’s neighbour at Kensington Palace was Princess Margaret, who lived in apartment 1A, the four-storey luxury house later given to William and Kate by the late Queen as a wedding present.
The two women had initially been close when Diana joined ‘the Firm’, but Margaret never forgave her for the perceived betrayal appearing on the BBC Panorama show.
Paul Burrell, Princess Diana’s former butler, claimed in his tell-all memoir that Princess Margaret would spot him sneaking in his boss’s then-boyfriend Dr Hasnat Khan through Margaret's more private front door.
Princess Margaret’s favourite residence was of course Les Jolies Eaux on the Caribbean Island of Mustique.
Gifted to the Princess upon her marriage to Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret developed the former plantation and built a villa there.
However by 1996 she had gifted it to her son, David Linley, who sold it in 1999 to a venture capitalist.
The property has been changed significantly since Princess Margaret's era and can now be rented out for $47,000 per week in high season.
