In this shot we're continuing to drive along Piccadilly past the top of St James Street. I'm not sure how clear it will be in the reduced sized image published for the web, but at the far end you will see St James's Palace on Pall Mall.

The palace was created during the reign of Henry VIII and was built primarily between 1531 and 1536. It was built on the site of a leper hospital. I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea, but it could have been Wolsey's revenge. (Cardinal Wolsey had of course been the de facto head of government under Henry but fell out of favour with him in the late 1520s after the whole Anne Boleyn business. Although not executed, it was only because he died before Henry could do it. Putting Henry's new palace on a former leper colony and not telling Henry might have been the perfect revenge. And it's not like anybody else would tell Henry either because in those days that could cost you your head.)

Like many palaces that I saw in London, it is not the sort of building that one would imagine a palace to be. A palace should be large (which this is), luxurious (which this may or may not be), grand and imposing which this is... not so much. It's a red brick building, stained and discoloured by pollution and age. The entrance with its towers and diamond clock stand out, but the rest of the building... you could be walking past a generic government building from the early 1900s if you didn't know better.

But nonetheless it's historic. For Henry it was only his number 2 palace after Whitehall Palace. (Buckingham House did not become the principal residence until much later.) Several kings and queens were born there; Charles I apparently spent his last night on earth there. It became the principal royal palace for a time after Whitehall Palace burnt down.

I originally shot this in portrait orientation which showed off the street better, but there was a honking great van turning right just at the bottom of the frame. I've therefore re-framed it as a landscape. Unfortunately you don't have a lot of control over foreground and background content when you're sitting on top of a moving bus.