The beautiful Temperate House at Kew Gardens, London is soon set to reopen after extensive renovation work - and it's an Instagram dream! The Victorian glasshouse has been closed for the past five years during a complex construction project designed to restore it to its original splendour, to the sum of £15million.
Much like Kew's Palm House, the Temperate House is set to be hugely popular with visitors when it opens its doors once again in May. It has been designed to provide a sanctuary for some of the rarest and most threatened plants from around the world, with spectacular water features and stunning design details, such as a white spiral staircase, among 10,000 exotic botanicals.
The Temperate House at Kew Gardens is set to reopen in May
The iconic building was closed to the public in 2013, and since then some 69,000 individual elements have been removed and cleaned, repaired or replaced. These include 15,000 panes of glass that were replaced, while 5,280 litres of paint have been used - enough to cover four football pitches.
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The building will reopen on 5 May, and will offer a programme of events designed for the whole family. Richard Barley, Director of Horticulture at RBG Kew, says: "The Temperate House will be for everyone. From young to old, for budding gardeners or aspiring artists, for those making a pilgrimage from great distances, and for our local community, we hope every visitor will see plants in a new light."
The iconic building is filled with 10,000 plants
Kew Gardens is one of the UK's most popular visitor attractions, with over 1.83 million visitors in 2016. It ranked at number 13 on the list of top 20 attractions, based on figures released by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (AVLA), behind other London hotspots such as the British Museum, the National Gallery and Natural History Museum.
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