Palace of Whitehall

The Palace of Whitehall (or Palace of White Hall) was the main residence of the English monarchs in London from 1530 until 1698 when most of its structures, except for Inigo Jones's 1622 Banqueting House, were destroyed by fire. Before then, it had grown to be the largest palace in Europe with more than 1,500 rooms, overtaking the Vatican and Versailles. The palace gives its name, Whitehall, to the road on which many of the current administrative buildings of the UK government are situated, and hence metonymically to the central government itself.