The Tulip Stairs
Inigo Jones (1573 to 1652) · 1635
Stand at the bottom and look up. The staircase spirals above you without any central support, each stone step set into the wall and resting on the one below, so that the whole flight seems to float in the round well of light. It was the first geometric self-supporting spiral stair built in Britain, completed in sixteen thirty five as part of Inigo Jones's Queen's House, and it still takes the breath away. The blue-painted wrought iron balustrade curls upward in a repeating pattern of flowers that gave the stair its name.
Look closely at the flowers. They have long been called tulips, a fashionable bloom in the sixteen thirties when tulip mania was gripping Holland, but many historians think they are actually lilies, the emblem of France and of the Bourbon queen Henrietta Maria for whom the house was finished. Either way, the ironwork is a rare survival from the reign of Charles the First. Notice how the treads are shaped so that each carries part of the load of the next, a trick Jones learned from the architecture of Palladio in Italy, and how the lantern at the top pours daylight down the well.
The Queen's House was begun for Anne of Denmark, wife of James the First, and completed for Henrietta Maria; it was the first fully classical building in England and it changed British architecture. The stair has one more claim to fame. In nineteen sixty six a retired Canadian clergyman, the Reverend Hardy, photographed the empty stair and found on his developed film what appeared to be shrouded figures climbing it. The photograph has never been convincingly explained, and the Tulip Stairs remain the most famous haunted staircase in London. Spiral photographs from the bottom are a Greenwich tradition.
Did You Know? The stair was the first self-supporting spiral staircase in Britain, and its flowers may be lilies for a French queen rather than tulips.
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