Palace of Whitehall

The Banqueting House, Whitehall, is the grandest and best known survivor of the architectural genre of banqueting house, which were constructed for elaborate entertaining. It is the only remaining component of the Palace of Whitehall, the residence of English monarchs from 1530 to 1698. The building is important in the history of English architecture as the first structure to be completed in the neo-classical style, which was to transform English architecture.Begun in 1619 and designed by Inigo Jones in a style influenced by Andrea Palladio, the Banqueting House was completed in 1622 at a cost of £15,618, 27 years before King Charles I of England was beheaded on a scaffold in front of it in January 1649. The building was controversially re-faced in Portland stone in the 19th century, though the details of the original façade were faithfully preserved. Today, the Banqueting House is a national monument, open to the public and preserved as a Grade I listed building. It is cared for by an independent charity, Historic Royal Palaces, which receives no funding from the British Government or the Crown.

Gwydyr House (Welsh: Tŷ Gwydyr) is a Grade II* listed mansion in Whitehall, and is the London headquarters of the Office of the Secretary of State for Wales. The house lies on the eastern side of the street, opposite Dover House.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI, Rusi), registered as Royal United Service Institute for Defence and Security Studies and formerly the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, is a British defence and security think tank. It was founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington, Sir Arthur Wellesley.The current President of RUSI is the Duke of Kent and its Director-General is Karin von Hippel.

The execution of Charles I by beheading occurred on Tuesday 30 January 1649 outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall. The execution was the culmination of political and military conflicts between the royalists and the parliamentarians in England during the English Civil War, leading to the capture and trial of Charles I. On Saturday 27 January 1649, the parliamentarian High Court of Justice had declared Charles guilty of attempting to "uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people" and he was sentenced to death.Charles spent his last few days in St James's Palace, accompanied by his most loyal subjects and visited by his family. On 30 January, he was taken to a large black scaffold constructed in front of the Banqueting House, where he was to be executed. A large crowd had gathered to witness the regicide. Charles stepped onto the scaffold and gave his last speech, declaring his innocence of the crimes of which parliament had accused him, and claiming himself as a "martyr of the people". The crowd could not hear the speech, owing to the many parliamentarian guards blocking the scaffold, but Charles' companion, Bishop William Juxon, recorded it in shorthand. Charles gave a few last words to Juxon, claiming his "incorruptible crown" in Heaven, and put his head on the block. He waited a few moments and gave a signal; the anonymous executioner beheaded Charles in one clean blow and held Charles' head up to the crowd silently, dropping it into the swarm of soldiers soon after. The execution has been described as one of the most significant and controversial events in English history. Some view it as the martyrdom of an innocent man, with Restoration historian Edward Hyde describing "a year of reproach and infamy above all years which had passed before it; a year of the highest dissimulation and hypocrisy, of the deepest villainy and most bloody treasons that any nation was ever cursed with" and the Tory Isaac D'Israeli writing of Charles as "having received the axe with the same collectedness of thought and died with the majesty with which he had lived", dying a "civil and political" martyr to Britain. Still others view it as a vital step towards democracy in Britain, with the prosecutor of Charles I, John Cook, declaring that it "pronounced sentence not only against one tyrant but against tyranny itself" and Whig historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner, who wrote that "with Charles' death the main obstacle to the establishment of a constitutional system had been removed. [...] The monarchy, as Charles understood it, had disappeared forever".

The statue of William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim in Whitehall, London, is a work of 1988–1993 by the sculptor Ivor Roberts-Jones. It is one of three memorials to British military leaders of World War II on Raleigh Green, outside the Ministry of Defence's Main Building, the others being Oscar Nemon's 1980 statue of Lord Montgomery and Roberts-Jones's statue of Lord Alanbrooke, erected later in 1993. Slim's bronze statue stands approximately 3 metres (9.8 ft) high on a pedestal of Portland stone.

The statue of the Duke of Devonshire is a Grade II-listed outdoor bronze sculpture of Spencer Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire, the leader of three British political parties between 1875 and 1903, and is located at the entrance to Horse Guards Avenue, Whitehall, London, England. A work of the sculptor Herbert Hampton, it was unveiled in 1911.The statue is around 4 metres high and rests on a plinth around 5 metres high. The inscription on the plinth gives the Duke's name, title, honours (KG for Knight of the Garter; he is depicted wearing his Garter robes) and year of birth and death.A committee headed by the Marquess of Lansdowne secured permission for the statue's location and the sculptor's design was approved by Edward VII in 1909 and completed the following year. The Marquess of Lansdowne unveiled the statue on 11 February 1911.

The Earl Haig Memorial is a bronze equestrian statue of the British Western Front commander Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig on Whitehall in Westminster, London. It was created by the sculptor Alfred Frank Hardiman and commissioned by Parliament in 1928. Eight years in the making, it aroused considerable controversy; the Field Marshal's riding position, his uniform, the horse's anatomy and its stance all drew harsh criticism. The inscription on the plinth reads 'Field Marshal Earl Haig Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France 1915–1918'.

The Ministry of Defence Main Building or MOD Main Building, also known as MOD Whitehall or originally as the Whitehall Gardens Building, is a grade I listed government office building located on Whitehall in London. The building was designed by E. Vincent Harris in 1915 and constructed between 1939 and 1959 on the site of the Palace of Whitehall. It was initially occupied by the Air Ministry and the Board of Trade before in 1964 becoming the current home of the Ministry of Defence. By the 1990s the building was no longer considered fit for purpose and had become expensive to maintain. A major refurbishment was therefore undertaken between 2000 and 2004 through a contract under the private finance initiative.

Horse Guards Avenue is a road in the City of Westminster, London, linking the major thoroughfares of Whitehall and Victoria Embankment, to the east of the Horse Guards building and parade area. The entrance of the Main Building of the Ministry of Defence (MoD), flanked by its monumental Earth and Water statues, opens onto the Avenue. A statue of a Gurkha soldier, unveiled in 1997, stands as a memorial in front of the Ministry of Defence.

The Memorial to the Brigade of Gurkhas on Horse Guards Avenue, Whitehall, London, was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II on 3 December 1997. This was the first memorial to Gurkha soldiers in the United Kingdom, and was occasioned by transfer of their headquarters and training centre from Hong Kong to London in 1997. The sculptor was Philip Jackson, working from a statue of 1924 by Richard Reginald Goulden in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the plinth was designed by Cecil Denny Highton.Two casts of Goulden's sculpture had previously been erected in locations in Nepal as World War I memorials to the Gurkhas, the first at Kunraghat in 1928 and the second at Birpur in 1930. The memorial in London is more than one and a half times the size of this model, so Jackson worked the figure up in his own style and from a living model, Captain Khemkumar Limbu. One of several inscriptions on the plinth is a quotation from Sir Ralph Lilley Turner, a former officer in the 3rd Gurkha Rifles.

Goose-Pie House was a small English Baroque house built by John Vanbrugh in Whitehall, London, in 1701. The house was demolished in 1898. The site now lies under the southeast corner of the Old War Office Building on Whitehall, near the Gurkha Memorial statue on Horse Guards Avenue.

Whitehall is a road and area in the City of Westminster, Central London. The road forms the first part of the A3212 road from Trafalgar Square to Chelsea. It is the main thoroughfare running south from Trafalgar Square towards Parliament Square. The street is recognised as the centre of the Government of the United Kingdom and is lined with numerous departments and ministries, including the Ministry of Defence, Horse Guards and the Cabinet Office. Consequently, the name 'Whitehall' is used as a metonym for the British civil service and government, and as the geographic name for the surrounding area. The name was taken from the Palace of Whitehall that was the residence of Kings Henry VIII through to William III, before its destruction by fire in 1698; only the Banqueting House has survived. Whitehall was originally a wide road that led to the front of the palace; the route to the south was widened in the 18th century following the destruction of the palace. As well as government buildings, the street is known for its memorial statues and monuments, including the UK's primary war memorial, the Cenotaph. South of the Cenotaph the thoroughfare becomes Parliament Street. The Whitehall Theatre (now the Trafalgar Studios) was formerly associated with a series of farces.