Why is the pool at Buckingham Palace a secret? (classic)

Summary

Search Engine Podcast Summary

Episode: Why is the pool at Buckingham Palace a secret? (Classic)

Host: PJ Vogt
Date: June 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this classic episode of Search Engine, host PJ Vogt and his team tackle a seemingly whimsical but surprisingly impenetrable mystery: What does the secret swimming pool at Buckingham Palace look like, and why is it so shrouded in secrecy? The quest, initially prompted by a listener named Chris, spirals into an investigative journey across archives, LinkedIn, palace tours, and interviews with palace insiders. Along the way, the team explores British royal privacy, institutional secrecy, and American-British cultural dynamics. The answer, it turns out, is both more mundane and more revealing than anyone anticipated.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Listener’s Question and the Nature of Curiosity

• Listener Chris confesses to being generally uninterested in royal gossip but inexplicably fixated on the existence—and secrecy—of a rumored palace pool.
  • "Even though British taxpayers have funded all 775 of those rooms, very few rooms can be seen by the British public." (07:54, Shruti)
• The team marvels at how some seemingly trivial questions stubbornly resist answers, igniting an investigative itch.

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2. Setting Out to Solve the Mystery

• PJ and producer Shruti recount the initial attempts:
  • Reaching out to the Royal Collection Trust (16:19) — "At those two words, swimming pool, they shut down like a pumpkin stand in November. Closed for business." (16:38, Shruti)
  • Attempting to leverage connections—British friends, dinner acquaintances, and even a palace intern, all unwilling or unable to divulge details about the pool.
  • Archive-diving and documentary-bingeing, finding aerial shots, floorplans, and wartime anecdotes but no solid glimpse of the pool’s interior.
• The BBC documentary, after hours, only confirms: "No images of the interior have ever been made public." (21:58, Narrator)

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3. Unpacking the Wall of Secrecy

• Ashley Hicks (palace insider, photographer, and Lord Mountbatten's grandson) explains how little of the palace anyone gets to see—even official insiders.
  • "So far as I know, it's a fairly ordinary swimming pool. But maybe it's magnificent, who knows? Maybe it's worthy of your president elect. Maybe it's entirely gold, I don’t know. Who knows?" (26:04, Ashley Hicks)
• The team encounters a "force field" of silence, with even former staff clamming up or going dark after brief acknowledgement.

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4. The Investigative Tactics: LinkedIn and the Tabloid Butler

• Enter investigative reporter Heidi Blake, who suggests using LinkedIn to find former palace employees.
  • "It's LinkedIn. That’s the secret." (30:59, Heidi Blake)
• Targeting staff with “swimming pool” in their job titles yields a handful of prospects (a project manager, an old electrician, and a maintenance officer turned aromatherapist)—all ultimately unresponsive.
• Contacting infamous ex-royal butler Paul Burrell results in a polite request for a £1,500 interview fee, prompting the hosts to reflect on American vs. British journalistic ethics (46:38, Garrett & PJ).

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5. On the Palace Grounds: The Fruitless “Closer Look”

• Garrett visits Buckingham Palace during the tourist off-season and returns in August, finally joining tours that bring him right by the mythic pool building.
  • "As the crow flies, we're 249 feet away from the building that supposedly has a swimming pool at it." (49:38, Garrett)
• Even standing inches from the pool’s smoked glass, “the panes just look ink-stained squares of glass.” (54:06, Garrett)
• Chance interaction with a tour guide who has swum in the pool yields only:
  “It’s just a normal swimming pool. Four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there are any accidents. There’s a squash court in there as well.” (55:12, Garrett recounting tour guide)

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6. The Breakthrough: An Insider Speaks

• The search leads to Hrithik Karya, a former summer retail assistant at the palace who’s now a podcaster.
• Hrithik shares insights on the culture of secrecy and confirms the ordinary reality of the pool:

  PJ: “What can you tell me about the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace?”
  Hrithik: “It’s just a swimming pool. Like, it's a tiled surface with a swimming pool in the middle of it, with changing rooms and a gym attached… you’re at your local gym with the swimming pool.” (64:06)

• No diving board (“very American”), but there is a squash court and a government-issue gym.

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7. Why All the Secrecy?

• Hrithik describes strict no-photo rules, not just for the pool but generally in the palace, resulting in few or no images existing at all (69:05).
• He pinpoints an additional, cultural factor:

  “Even if you don’t like them, a lot of British people are very protective—conversations of the royals should only occur between British people.” (71:11)

• Many Brits suspect American curiosity is tinged with mockery or superiority, inflating the taboo around such questions.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Chris (Listener) on the pool’s lure:

  “The reason that we haven’t been able to see the swimming pool is actually what makes me feel like I need to see it. I just kind of imagine that it’s the coolest swimming pool ever.” (11:04)

• Ashley Hicks on the palace mystique:

  “Whereas Buckingham Palace, generally speaking, people got no idea. There’s very little of it that gets seen.” (24:15)

• Heidi Blake (Investigative reporter):

  “Come on, guys. What are they hiding? What is so secret about this pool? This is crazy.” (29:08)

• Hrithik (Ex-palace staff):

  “It’s just a pool, mate.” (72:11)

• PJ Vogt’s closing reflection:

  “Why had the pool been kept a secret from me? Perhaps because I was a loud American and the legions of British people who we’d emailed likely held in their hearts a prejudice about my ilk… We were here to tease, maybe as a way of feeling better about the faults in our own system.” (71:11)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:11: The pain of “it’s complicated” answers and the origins of the question
• 07:54–09:25: Chris runs into the mystery—tabloid headlines, aerial photos
• 16:19–17:28: The Royal Collection Trust stonewalls
• 21:58: BBC documentary admits it has no pool pictures
• 25:39–26:26: Ashley Hicks has never seen the pool
• 30:59: Heidi Blake’s LinkedIn reporting “magic”
• 39:54–43:33: Producer Garrett’s exhausting pursuit of leads
• 55:12: Tour guide’s tantalizing but mundane description: “just a normal swimming pool… a squash court in there as well”
• 64:06: Hrithik reveals the interior is a standard tiled pool and gym—no marble, no gold
• 69:39–71:11: Cultural explanation for secrecy and British defensiveness toward American curiosity

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Conclusion

What started as a lighthearted curiosity about the secret Buckingham Palace pool becomes a reflection on cultural boundaries, privacy, and the genuinely human urge to know what’s on the other side of forbidden doors. The answer, at last: It’s just a pool—a perfectly average staff amenity, hidden not because of grandeur, but perhaps because the ordinariness would detract from the myth, or simply because, in Britain, some parts of royal life are off-limits, especially to outsiders.

As for why the pool remains a secret? Sometimes, the simple truth is—“It’s just a pool, mate.” (72:11, Hrithik)

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For more episodes or to support the show, visit Search Engine’s official site or subscribe for bonus content.

Transcript

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[PJ Vogt]

Hello Search Engine Nation and all the ships at sea. Summer is finally, actually, truly here. And this week we are celebrating by bringing you one of our very favorite classic episodes of Search Engine.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

An enjoyable, well enjoyable for us, hopefully for you.

[PJ Vogt]

Quest after a very silly question. It's a story about kings and queens and the places they allegedly cannonball. A story which took Search Engines team of crack reporters across the Atlantic. I hope you like it. We'll be back next week with a new one for you. Or if you just need to hear something new from us right now we actually have a fresh new episode on the Incognito Mode feed. It's a story that is about the pursuit of greatness and spicy noodles. But in order to hear that, you would need to be a subscriber to our Incognito Mode, which you can find at searchengine.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Show Sam. Most human beings start asking questions at about two and a half years old. Our first questions usually begin with what? The quintessential toddler query. What's that? The more sophisticated how and when questions those developmentally arrive around three and then between three and five. The deluge. The constant questions. The why questions. Why is salami so hard to stop eating?

[PJ Vogt]

Why do people lie?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

If you can think back, you can probably remember this age when your parents were like perfect Search engines capable of handling almost anything you threw at them. And you also might remember the few times they'd refuse when you'd ask some question whose answer they weren't quite ready to share. And you'd get an it's complicated. Or maybe a when you're older. I can remember, I swear, decades later, the frustration of that strange, invisible wall. In fact, I was reminded of that wall quite recently. A listener had a question about something that felt, honestly, very basic, very answerable, but it just wasn't. It was an unpatchable hole in my understanding of the world. And the more we tried to answer it, the less it seemed like a fun lark and the more it made me want to howl with rage. Made, actually the entire staff here howl with rage. Why couldn't we know this? Why was it being kept from us?

[PJ Vogt]

Check, check, check.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

It started in a stylishly appointed one bedroom apartment not far from my house.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

Hi.

[PJ Vogt]

Hey. How's it going?

[Chris (Listener)]

How's it going? Welcome.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The listener whose home we just entered, his name was Chris. Chris sends me a lot of questions. They tend to be especially good. And the question he had this time was about the British Royal family. Well, sort of.

[PJ Vogt]

Are you normally a royals person?

[Chris (Listener)]

I am not normally a royals person. I came into this when it just felt like the entire world was conspiring to make me care.

[Garrett Graham]

Yes.

[Chris (Listener)]

You know, and I needed to find my own way to care about it.

[PJ Vogt]

Right. Like, if this is going to be the only show on the TV of the Internet, you're going to find like a minor, like, plot line that you can get into.

[Chris (Listener)]

Exactly. I need to find a hidey hole that feels like it's my own.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

Yes.

[Chris (Listener)]

Yeah.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

When Chris and I were talking, it was early summer, 2023, and the entire world seemed obsessed with something that was happening in England. The coronation of King Charles. In case you did not care or follow a recap, Queen Elizabeth had died, her son Charles was taking the throne. And there was some drama attached to the occasion. A feud between Charles's son, Prince Harry, and his relatives. There was a tell all book, an Oprah interview, allegations flying to and fro. Many people had questions about the royals, about their private lives. I did not. Every royal headline hits my ear the same.

[PJ Vogt]

It's always like, Prince Chatterley of the

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

House Targaryen had a royal row at the Buckminster dog show or whatever. I tuned it out the way I always tune it out. But for Chris, all this din did a funny thing to his curiosity. It made him wonder. Not about the royals interior lives, but instead about a different kind of royal interior.

[Chris (Listener)]

So, okay, around the time of all of the coronation drama, I went down this really insane rabbit hole looking up facts about Buckingham Palace. I guess I was just kind of intrigued by this idea that Prince Charles was moving into a new palace. And it just looks so beautiful and stately from the outside. And I was like, I wonder what it looks on the inside. It's probably the most famous palace in the world. We all can imagine what it looks like on the outside. It's just like the storybook version of

[PJ Vogt]

a palace I actually cannot picture. Can we look at it?

[Chris (Listener)]

Of course. So, okay, pulling it up on Google images, I'm going to show you the outside.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

So this exterior photo that Chris pulls up, it's honestly a little hard to describe, but I'm going to give it a shot. I see lots of Corinthian columns, many windows, most capped with these beautiful stone triangular pediments. Honestly, it's a little similar to the building style you see in Washington DC's monuments. It's just significantly more impressive.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, it's a massive palace.

[Chris (Listener)]

It's insane. And the idea of living in it is just so inconceivable because it's like

[PJ Vogt]

you're living in the part of Washington D.C. that all the fancy buildings are, but that's just your home. Yeah, I live in the Pentagon. The White House, the Washington Monument. It's not a home, but it is a home. It's like the home for the fanciest people in Britain.

[Chris (Listener)]

Exactly, yeah. I mean, the White House is a really interesting thing to compare it to because the White House, I just have zero curiosity about what it's like in there. I feel like, I know, it's like boring wallpaper, it's four poster beds, you know what I mean? And it just looks small and rinky dink compared to this. Let's Google the number of rooms. I feel like it's close to a thousand.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh Jesus. 775. That's fucking insane.

[Chris (Listener)]

That's crazy. Like we're in my apartment right now. It's approximately three rooms.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

775 rooms is a lot of rooms. It's a lot more than three. But what had specifically piqued Chris's curiosity is that even though British taxpayers have funded all 775 of those rooms, very few rooms can be seen by the British public. The White House, you can visit, you can tour. If you win an election, you could live there. Buckingham palace is different. It belongs to dynasts of One family forever. And the vast majority of its many rooms are only accessible to that family and their many servants. You can go on a tour, but you won't see very much. As Chris tumbled down this rabbit hole, he found that his curiosity was particularly drawn to one mysterious room.

[Chris (Listener)]

One thing that I surfaced in my research about Buckingham palace was there's a pool. Obviously there's a pool that's a very commonplace amenity, but there are no pictures of the pool. No one's outside of the royal family seems to have seen this pool. It's a very private amenity.

[PJ Vogt]

Wait, no one's ever taken a photograph of the pool in Buckingham Palace.

[Chris (Listener)]

It does not exist on the Internet. There are speculations about where it is. So if you Google this pool, you'll see this little chunk.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Chris pulls up the Google search results, which spit out a bunch of screaming British tabloid headlines about the existence of this secret Buckingham palace pool. Some feature photos taken from a helicopter or maybe a drone very high up, with one section of the palace exterior circled.

[PJ Vogt]

My God. It's like a CIA intelligence photo where someone's taken an aerial shot of Buckingham palace and then they've just, with a white circle circled their theory for instead of where Bin Laden's hiding in a cave, it's where they think the pool is hiding in Buckingham Palace.

[Chris (Listener)]

That is exactly what it's like. And I need to know what it looks like in there. So look, this is a closer picture of it. I think this is about the closest we've ever.

[PJ Vogt]

This is definitely the pool house. So it's like a. It's hard to tell the scale. It's either a two or three story stone building with giant window frames, like, oh, this would be a really nice pool because it has the thing where you kind of have modern buildings have big windows that look out onto a yard, but this, it's on an old Romany looking building. And then also you get the view from an outside pool, but it's indoor and I'm sure it's heated. Oh, that's nice. That's really nice.

[Chris (Listener)]

It's the Parthenon with windows.

[PJ Vogt]

The Parthenon with windows. If it were just a swimming pool

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

at this point, it might bear repeating. Chris does not care about the royals. If anything, he resents how much information about them has been dumped without his consent into his mind. Photos of them in their bathing suits, anecdotes about their squabbles. Chris doesn't care about the royals. Except now that there was one private room in the life of this Internationally overexposed family. One volume of water that had been perhaps arbitrarily made private. Now that Chris was being told he wasn't allowed to know about the pool, perversely, his curiosity roared online.

[Chris (Listener)]

The reason that we haven't been able to see the swimming pool is actually what makes me feel like I need to see it. I just kind of imagine that it's the coolest swimming pool ever. Like, that's sort of how I think of it.

[PJ Vogt]

And for you, is that like a really tall diving board? Is it like, a really deep, deep end? Is it like a Jacuzzi where it's kind of not tepid and gross? Like, what is the coolest swimming pool ever in your imagination?

[Chris (Listener)]

I think it's, like, the rarest marble. Like, you know. Yeah. I think it's, like, just insane materials that it's made of.

[PJ Vogt]

For me, it would also be about,

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

like, the stair placement, like.

[PJ Vogt]

Cause I think sometimes when you get to experience a big swimming pool, the problem is where the stairs are, where you, like, have to, like, swim too much to get out of it. And I just feel like the royals

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

would have had really thoughtful stare placement.

[Chris (Listener)]

Yeah, I agree. I think every detail has been considered, including that one.

[PJ Vogt]

I assume that curiouser people about the royals than me have pored through every part of their life sometimes in really tragic ways. I don't think that I'm intrepid enough that I will actually end up in Buckingham palace hanging from the rafters with a little camera or whatever. But I want to fulfill the curiosity at the hardest question. What can I get you that will feel like an answer to this question, which might be unanswerable.

[Chris (Listener)]

I would settle for anything better than what's out there online. Any kind of imagery you could paint for me around the interior, any scenes you can paint for me. Yeah. So and so, like, went to the pool and, like, ordered poolside Negronis. I'm like, if I can just basically

[PJ Vogt]

pull this pool one mote more into the light of public view, you will be happy.

[Chris (Listener)]

That's exactly right.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay. I think I can. That feels achievable. All right, thank you, Chris.

[Chris (Listener)]

I believe in you. Thank you.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

After the break, we dive in foreign.

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[PJ Vogt]

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[PJ Vogt]

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[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Slate has never been afraid to tell

[PJ Vogt]

it like it is and hold powerful feet to the fire.

[Chris (Listener)]

We want to try to defend our communities, our families, our people.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

But what if you can't?

[PJ Vogt]

What next?

[Sierra Miller]

Asks tough questions without forgetting who's at

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

the center of our work.

[PJ Vogt]

You follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the show.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Chapter 1 the Outer Circle when we started trying to answer this question almost two years ago, it's not that we

[PJ Vogt]

thought it'd be easy, but frankly, it

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

didn't seem that hard. We'd set the bar low enough we just needed to talk to a person who had seen the pool with their own eyes. All we were seeking was a fact as small as did the royal pool have a royal diving board?

[PJ Vogt]

If so, was it one of the

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

really big ones, like with a ladder? So we made our reporting plan. First stop, the Press office of the Royal Collection Trust, the organization that manages visitor access to Buckingham Palace. We told them we were very interested in the architectural history of the palace and asked if they could make a historian available for an interview

[PJ Vogt]

to our delay.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

They responded. They asked for a list of questions in advance. We sent them over. Questions with our question about the pool

[PJ Vogt]

artfully tucked towards the back, where we

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

hoped it would not trigger alarms. We said we just wanted to know if the palace had modern amenities, like perhaps a swimming pool.

[PJ Vogt]

And if so, could they talk about

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

that at those two words, swimming pool. They shut down like a pumpkin stand in November. Closed for business. I'm sorry for the disappointing response. We do appreciate you getting in touch.

[Garrett Graham]

Huh?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Okay, we fanned out. Next, we tried six degrees of separation. We hit up every friend of ours who was British or knew a British person, anyone remotely famous or who knew a remotely famous person. Shockingly, one person we knew had an old friend who had married into an obscure branch of the extended royal universe. She and her spouse, a member of the royal household, had been to the palace many times, but neither had ever seen this pool. Weird. One lovely British woman I met at a dinner, literally this devolved into just asking strangers at dinners about the royals,

[Garrett Graham]

told me, oh, this will be an

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

easy question to answer. There's lots of students actually who intern at the palace. And she said she knew at least one. So she texted her friend, a former palace intern. The friend confirms over text. Yes, there's a pool, but then immediately clammed up. They said they couldn't really talk about their time there, even though this was years ago. What were these monarchs hiding in their murky marine depths? Our next move was to go to the archives. Producer Garrett Graham read newspaper clips about the palace until his eyes bled. And then we started watching the documentaries.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

Buckingham palace, one of the most famous buildings on the planet. Home to arguably the world, world's most famous family.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

This particular series looked very promising. A quote, six part look at the secrets of Buckingham Palace.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

Today, it's the largest private house in the country with an astonishing 775 rooms, including a swimming pool.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The swimming pool.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

They go on a swimming pool, a doctor's surgery and a post office. There's even an ATM in the basement that dispenses cash only for the royal.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Did the royals use cash? Question for a different episode.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

This is the story of Buckingham Palace.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The documentary series starts well before the existence of the swimming pool. It starts actually with the story of the palace before it was yet the modern palace.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

If you traveled back in time 260 years, Buckingham palace would have looked like this.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

We see an exterior shot of a red brick house on a country lane. Handsome, stately, certainly nicer than your house, but not a palace.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

That's because Buckingham palace didn't start life as a royal residence. It was originally built as a private house by a man called the Duke of Buckingham.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The private house that our modern Buckingham palace would be expanded out from, that first came into the royal family in 1761. In the centuries after, some of England's most notable architects would in phases, transform this red brick townhouse into the 830,000 square foot behemoth that sits there today. The story of that transformation is unspooled across the series, many installments. But it begins to dawn on the attentive viewer as these installments roll on, that even in what has been billed as a six part expose, the host is clearly locked outside of the palace gates. The cameras don't film the interiors. Instead, it's a lot of blueprints, it's a lot of recreations, a lot of people in wigs. The swimming pool's appearance in the dock as a topic comes after the section about Queen Elizabeth's many corgis

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

as well as a corgi. King George gave his daughters another presentation, something which isn't found in the average home even today.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

We've arrived after 3 hours and 48 minutes of punishing non pool related content at the subject that brought us here.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

By the time the 1930s came around, no self respecting grand house was complete without its own swimming pool. And so George VI planned a surprise for his daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, somewhere for them to have their weekly swimming lesson from the comfort of their own home.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

You'd expect in this moment in a sane or just world to see the damn pool, even just a still photograph of it. Instead what we get is the palace floor plans we've already seen. Except now they add a green rectangle to represent the location of the swimming pool. And then they cut to a very familiar by now exterior shot of the pool building, the Parthenon, with windows photographed as always from a great distance away. We are no closer here than we were with Chris. They recite some facts that we'd already come across in the newspaper archives, like the infamous Nazi attack on the pool soon after its creation.

[PJ Vogt]

So almost immediately after the start of the blitz, a bomb landed and it wrecked the swimming pool.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Maybe the Nazis were also mad they weren't allowed to see the pool. But the pool was later rebuilt. We learned that King Charles as a little kid would invite his schoolmates over to sail model boats in the pool. But still nothing really about the pool itself. Does it have a diving board? A marble staircase? Is it big?

[PJ Vogt]

Is it small?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Is it an above ground number? We learn zilch.

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

It remains there to this day, but it's one of the most private parts of the palace. No images of the interior have ever been made public.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

So this was the totality of what the BBC documentary could offer us about the pool. Basically nothing. It felt like we needed to talk to someone who actually had royal connections who could get inside the palace with a camera in their hand. Can you just introduce yourself, like say

[PJ Vogt]

your name and what you do?

[Ashley Hicks]

Hello, I'm Ashley Hicks and I'm a designer of interiors and objects for them and also a photographer of historic interiors. And I've written a book about Buckingham palace's interiors.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Chapter 2. The Palace Photographer Ashley Hicks spent months roaming Buckingham palace taking these beautiful, naturally lit, shadow drenched portraits of the interior rooms. He also has a personal connection to the palace. His grandfather was Lord Mountbatten, uncle of the late Queen's husband, Prince Philip. Ashley's relatives were central enough to the Royal family that as a kid, every June, he would get an invitation to the Queen's birthday parade.

[Ashley Hicks]

We would go and watch them ride back into the palace and we'd go and give the horses sugar lumps and carrots and then we would go up and have a Coca Cola because we were children and some sandwiches with our mothers saying, now make sure you eat enough because that's all the lunch you're getting.

[PJ Vogt]

How were the sandwiches at the palace?

[Ashley Hicks]

They were pretty good, actually. There were Marmite ones, which, you know, obviously are very good if you like Marmite and if you don't even know what Marmite is.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

I don't.

[Ashley Hicks]

Then you need to study a bit of English culture.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Ashley, a person more intimate with the palace and its residents than most, he understood why we'd become curious about the palace interiors. Unlike its closest American relative, the White House, Buckingham palace just feels inherently more shrouded.

[Ashley Hicks]

I mean, the interesting thing about the White House in a way is the amount that you see it in movies and on tv.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Yes.

[Ashley Hicks]

And I mean that Oval Office. I mean, I feel like I've lived there, don't you?

[PJ Vogt]

I do. And I feel like, I mean, literally

[Ashley Hicks]

I know how to get to the secretary's room, I know how to get to the West Wing. Whereas Buckingham palace, generally speaking, people got no idea. There's very little of it that gets seen. I mean, you can buy a ticket and go around and look at it, but then you don't see very many rooms.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Of course, Ashley has seen many more of these interior rooms than most of us. In 2018, the Royal Collection Trust enlisted Ashley to document the formal spaces of the palace. The grand hall, the throne room, the royal closet. And what was it like to photograph it?

[Ashley Hicks]

Well, it was great fun, you know, it was slightly, you know, every time I wanted to move an object or move a chair or something, there were shrieks of horror, you know, and somebody would have to come scuttling along with a pair of white gloves for me to put on. Then I was told, oh, don't lift a chair by its arms, you know, all this kind of thing.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

How many of the 775 rooms were

[PJ Vogt]

you allowed to photograph?

[Ashley Hicks]

Oh, I don't know. Are there 30, something like that? Are there really? 775? Maybe there are.

[PJ Vogt]

That's what I've been told.

[Ashley Hicks]

Maybe there are.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

You can hear me, I think, cautiously approaching the object of our interest here. I didn't want to scare off a royal relative, but I moved the conversation to one specific page in his book, the page on which our quarry had appeared.

[PJ Vogt]

I have your book here and it's. I have it dog eared. On page 90 you have this beautiful exterior shot of. It's taken from the back gardens.

[Ashley Hicks]

Exactly.

[PJ Vogt]

And so then on the left side

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

of the photo, there's this building that it sort of resembles the Parthenon, with windows.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

Is that the pool house?

[Ashley Hicks]

I think that is the pool.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Have you been inside?

[Ashley Hicks]

No, no, I haven't, no.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And are you curious about it?

[Ashley Hicks]

Not especially. So far as I know, it's a fairly ordinary swimming pool. But maybe it's magnificent, who knows? Maybe it's worthy of your president elect. Maybe it's entirely gold, I don't know. Who knows?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Even the photographer who was allowed to photograph, to move ever so slightly, the most precious furniture of the palace, the photographer who is the grandson of Lord Mountbatten himself, even this man had not seen the pool. When a secret is kept for long enough and no reason is given, lesser minds become deranged. They start to believe in conspiracy theories. They talk about Adrenochrome, 5G, inside jobs, the Freemasons. I was not there yet. But spring of 2020 four months into this question, nowhere near its answer, a strange pattern began to occur. We had by then reached out to so many people. Several royal biographers, any royal affiliate, no matter how extended, who'd been quoted in a news article and who seemed promising, the childhood friend of King Charles, who'd sailed boats with him in the pool. And usually we'd get no response. Sometimes we'd get One helpful email back, but then immediately after, the line would go dead. This was the exact feeling you get when. When you're reporting on a celebrity and they're telling their network to give you the cold shoulder. Did the pool see us coming? All I knew was we kept bumping into this invisible, sturdy royal wall, a force field I knew we couldn't quite understand, but which I was sure was there. And then my editor, Shruthi, got this idea, which actually occurred to her while listening to a podcast. The podcast was called the Runaway Princesses. This incredible story about a royal family in Dubai. The story of alleged abuse of two of the princesses there. It was dark, it was fascinating. But the thing that struck Shruti was the reporting. An investigative reporter had managed to crack into a much more impenetrable wall of silence. Not the British royals, but the Dubai ones who owned several fancy, extremely private residences in the uk. This reporter was the person we needed to talk to.

[Heidi Blake]

Yeah, the only thing I should warn you is I live by the sea. And so there may be some unavoidable seagull noise, but we can try and avoid it.

[PJ Vogt]

That sounds bucolic. That sounds relaxing. I feel like it's not.

[Heidi Blake]

They're so rowdy. It's really deeply irritating after a while.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Chapter three. The Investigative reporter by the sea. Heidi Blake is a writer for the New Yorker, host of the podcast Runaway Princesses. We spoke this past April. I'd emailed her with my predicament, and she generously agreed to talk, despite the profound triviality of our investigation. You have a history of reporting on

[PJ Vogt]

one of the harder areas of reporting, which is extremely powerful, extremely secretive. Families, like oligarchs, royal families. Why is this the kind of story you find yourself drawn to?

[Heidi Blake]

That is a great question and something I often ask myself. Like, I kind of constantly try to find a story that is slightly less unwieldy and then get drawn into these, like, knotty morasses and think, why do I do this to myself? But I don't know. I just. There's something that sort of activates in me where I feel like there is a kind of concentration of power in the hands of a person or people who are abusing it. I don't know. I kind of reach a certain level of outrage, and it spurs me on to really want to get to the bottom of something. But also, this is so fun because this is kind of not an outrageous thing. This is just like a. This is just an intriguing, like, why the hell don't we know what this pool looks like. Come on, guys. What are they hiding? What is so secret about this pool? This is crazy.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Heidi was the first British person I spoke to who seemed able to see the invisible wall, who didn't tell me that this was going to be easy before ghosting me for the rest of time. Heidi both appreciated the strange complexity of her question and had suggestions about how to get it answered.

[Heidi Blake]

With the reporting I did on the Dubai Royal Family, they've just had hundreds and hundreds of people pass through their employment. And actually, that means it's not very difficult to find some people among them. Especially, you know, if you make it a numbers game and you just approach a ton of people, some of them are gonna feel like talking to you.

[PJ Vogt]

And do you like. I mean, when you're doing one of your investigations and you're like, okay, I want chauffeurs for the Royal Family in this time period, is it just like. I mean, I assume you're not going on LinkedIn.

[Heidi Blake]

I am literally going on LinkedIn.

[Garrett Graham]

You're going on LinkedIn.

[Heidi Blake]

That is literally what I'm doing. Yeah. LinkedIn is amazing. And this. I feel like this is one of those things where, like, you know, magicians should never reveal their secrets because, like, it's LinkedIn. That's the secret.

[PJ Vogt]

Really.

[Heidi Blake]

It's unbelievably good. Yeah. Because what you can do is. I mean, this is obviously like, a totally unintended consequence of LinkedIn, but everybody is on LinkedIn and everybody has put their whole professional history on LinkedIn. So you can go on there and you can say, show me everybody who has previously worked at Buckingham palace, and it will give you hundreds and hundreds of results, and then you can filter those. So I took the liberty of, like, doing this. Oh, my God. What we would find.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Thank you.

[Heidi Blake]

No, I mean, you know, you guys could do it yourself. It's kind of amazingly easy. But so you can put in Buckingham palace, or the other way they describe it, is the royal household.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

I was following along on my side on the computer, and it was amazing to see royal household enter and then this wall of humans. It wasn't that we hadn't been trying to reach former employees, but our methods had been relatively haphazard. Now we had this well organized database, this surveillance system that people had volunteered for. Heidi filtered her search to just show ex employees the people most likely to talk.

[Heidi Blake]

And if you do that, you have, like, hundreds of results. You have a summer warden, a sous chef, butlers, junior footman, a building surveyor. There's a guy who was the marshal of the diplomatic corps. But then this is when I got excited. Then if you add the search term swimming pool, there are three people who are specifically talking about having worked in and around that swimming pool. So, like, these guys definitely know. So you have.

[PJ Vogt]

Wait, so I'm looking. Oh, my God. So wait, you see, I'm seeing.

[Heidi Blake]

I've got a.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

We're bleeping out the names here just to respect the privacy of these people.

[Heidi Blake]

So was a household electrician at Buckingham palace from September 1971 to August 1992, and one of his duties is listed as maintenance of swimming pool plant. So, like, this dude has seen that pool and why would he not tell you? And also, these people all have left the palace a really long time ago. So I just don't think they're going to be feeling that awkward about talking about it.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

We went through the details of these former palace employees and then Heidi told me she had her own theory about the pool, a hypothesis as to why it might be hidden behind a veil of secrecy.

[Heidi Blake]

Well, I think this is just a hunch, but I bet you it's a really scuzzy, rundown pool.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, that's so funny. Because my assumption would be they don't want you to see it because it's like, so in America, the wealthy are constantly trying to make you believe they're upper middle class. And so I was picturing something like opulent and golden and maybe like, maybe

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

there was an elephant there somehow.

[PJ Vogt]

But you're like, oh, it might just be kind of a crappy pool.

[Heidi Blake]

I think so. Because I guess, you know, obviously Buckingham palace does pomp and grandeur and circumstance and they wear that on their sleeves. But I think that one of the things particular about the Queen was that actually, you know, Rima always had it that in her private apartments. Actually, those rooms were really shabby with like threadbare carpet and really old fashioned wallpaper. And there was this amazing thing back in 2003, a reporter from a tabloid here called the Mirror newspaper managed to get a job as a footman at Buckingham Palace. He worked there for two months. And they kind of did it ostensibly as a, like, this is a massive security breach. I could have poisoned the Queen thing. But actually the thing that everyone remembers from that story is that he got photos of the Queen's private breakfast room. And it's like, I'll send you a picture. But it is like super shabby. And she's eating her breakfast out of Tupperware.

[PJ Vogt]

Really?

[Heidi Blake]

Everyone was just like, the Queen is eating Breakfast out of Tupperware. Like she's eating corn flakes out of Tupperware. And that was the thing. Like no one had ever seen that before.

[PJ Vogt]

Heidi sent me a link to the story and in the photos I could

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

see the weirdly dingy room. There's a plastic princess phone, an FM transistor radio on the table.

[PJ Vogt]

I have to admit, it gives me a feeling I've never felt towards the

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

royals, a warm feeling. They seem human. The Queen here living like a retiree who just needs to make her pension

[Heidi Blake]

last, which I think is basically the situation of the monarchy. Their estate is huge and kind of enormously expensive to maintain, and they're having to constantly scrap for taxpayer funding to kind of maintain these state rooms. And so the Queen was notoriously frugal, you know, with her own sort of stuff. And so that's my hunt. I reckon this pool is run down and embarrassing and they don't want anyone to see it for that reason. But I mean, I could be completely wrong. Maybe there is an elephant.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Our listener Chris, had imagined that because the pool was hidden, it had to be fabulous.

[PJ Vogt]

Perhaps there's an American bias that expects

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

that anything hidden must be special, exciting, better than what's here. Heidi's view was that, like many backstages, Buckingham Palaces could be less glamorous than what the public got to see. In any event, we had another path to try. We're going to take a short break, and when we return, Search Engine crosses an ocean.

[DSW Advertiser]

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[PJ Vogt]

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombas. Okay, I don't know about you, but the second it starts feeling like spring, I just want to be outside walking more, making plans, just moving again. It's also when I start swapping in my warm weather staples, starting with Bombas. I've been getting into longer walks lately and their sports socks have made such a difference. They're cushioned moisture wicking and they actually stay in place, so I'm not stopping every five minutes to fix them. And once the boots go away, Bomba's

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

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[PJ Vogt]

They're made from this lightweight, waterproof material that's really soft but still supportive. Perfect for quick errands or just hanging out at home. Also, their underwear and tees are a hidden gem. Super soft, breathable, and just way more comfortable than your standard basics. And for every item you buy, Bombus donates one to someone facing housing insecurity, which makes it even better. Head over to bombus.com engine and use code ENGINE for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O m b a s.com engine code engine at checkout.

[Sierra Miller]

Why have we asked our contractor we

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

found on Angie.com to be our kid's legal guardian?

[Alltrails Advertiser]

Because he took such good care when

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

redoing our basement that we knew we

[Sierra Miller]

could trust him to care for our

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

kids, all eight of them, should something happen to us.

[PJ Vogt]

Are you my dad now?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

No, sorry. I do basements. Connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years. Angie, the one you trust to find

[Chris (Listener)]

the ones you trust.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Find pros for all your home [e-mail].

[PJ Vogt]

Welcome back to the show. Okay, I think you're, like, super off mic. Or else I'm.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

I'm probably off mic. I also can't hear myself at all.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Search engines Royal correspondent Garrett Graham.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Hey, pj.

[PJ Vogt]

Hey, Garrett.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

How's it going?

[PJ Vogt]

You know, another day in paradise.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Yeah, Yeah. I am here to tell you about some digging that I've done.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

I need to be honest here. I've been using the royal we in this episode a lot. We researched, we investigated the royal we for most of these months. Was Garrett on this journey? Garrett didn't just ingest historic newspaper archives and royal biographies. Honestly, by this point, he knew more about the palace than many of the experts we were talking to. The pool question had bit him the same way as it bit our listener. Chris Garrett had gone from a person who didn't care about the royals to someone who deeply wanted to see their pool. And more than anything, he wanted to know why it was the pool would be a state secret. So when reporter Heidi Blake had surfaced these new leads, Garrett jumped on them.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

So walking out of that conversation with Heidi, it felt like she had mapped out this, like, crazy wall of suspects connected to the palace by, like, red string. And all that was left for us to do was, like, trace that red string until we found a suspect who would talk and flip somebody.

[PJ Vogt]

Are they convicted of a crime?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

They're convicted of having seen the swimming pool at Buckingham palace and not telling us about it yet in the World

[PJ Vogt]

of podcasting, holding onto narratively interesting information is a crime.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

It is a crime and they're found guilty. So the first person that I reached out to was the tabloid guy that Heidi told us about, like the mirror reporter who had snuck into the palace and snapped a photo of the queen's corn flakes or whatever.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Mm.

[Heidi Blake]

Um.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

But it turned out that the tabloid had dealt with some legal action after this piece came out, and so they had actually agreed not to publish any more information from their reporting, which meant that the tabloid guy was out.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Yeah.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

But the next step that I took was just to start reaching out to the people on LinkedIn.

[PJ Vogt]

Mm.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And as reporter Heidi Blake mentioned, there's basically three people who had mentioned the swimming pool on their profile. There's a 20something project manager, there's a retired electrician, and there is a maintenance officer turned aromatherapist, all of whom were one time employees of Buckingham palace, but

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

are no longer a maintenance officer turned aromatherapist.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

That is right.

[PJ Vogt]

Life has so many chapters.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

It does. That's not a chapter you expect to find in a book about Buckingham palace, but it's one that I was pretty charmed to find.

[PJ Vogt]

So, okay, so you're poking around.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

So, yeah, the first guy I decide to reach out to is the 20 something project manager. He worked at the palace just a few years ago. And the clue on his head, his profile that, like, he might have the goods that we're looking for is that he was involved with realizing, quote, substantial carbon saving opportunities for the on site swimming pool plant operation.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay, that feels like. It feels like.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

It feels promising. It feels like this guy would have seen the pool.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Right.

[PJ Vogt]

A neon sign.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

So I, like, sleuth this guy out on the Internet. I learned pretty quickly that he's ex military and also happened to share the name of a 14th century Earl of Pembroke, which, to me, those are two details that kind of suggest, like, this guy might have some sympathies towards the royals, and maybe he won't be willing to break the privacy for the sake of an American podcast.

[PJ Vogt]

It's so funny how producing a podcast is kind of like online dating where, like, you're cold approaching someone and you're looking at their little footprint and you're just like, are they gonna like me? Are they gonna talk to me? Like, it's sort of the same, like drawing a painting from a couple dots type of thing.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Yeah. And I reach out several times, actually. No response. Totally fine. We have more suspects. I move on to the next one.

[Garrett Graham]

Okay.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

The next Person I reach out to is the retired electrician. He worked there from the 70s to the 90s, which on the, it means like, it's been a while since this guy's seen the pool. But on the other hand, it means like, he was definitely there before the NDA era, and so maybe he's more keen to chat with us about it. I reach out LinkedIn and on Facebook, again, zero response.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay, so then what?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

I go to the final person on LinkedIn and honestly, this is the one that I'm kind of the most optimistic about because again, this is the maintenance officer turned aroma therapist.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, okay.

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Their LinkedIn bio just reads, quote, using aromas to support positive mental health. Which is like, not only is this a person who is in a totally different field of work now, but this is like a decidedly non royal line of work.

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, okay.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And so I'm like, we found our person. I just need to get this person to see the note that I send. And so I reach out on every single platform I could find her on. And this one actually turned out kind of interesting. She said nothing.

[PJ Vogt]

So wait, what was interesting?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Not a single word of reply. There was nothing interesting about it. It was just a failed attempt at a joke.

[PJ Vogt]

I see, I see.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

But anyway, the point of all this is just to say that LinkedIn was kind of a bust. There were other people that I reached out to who didn't want to talk to us. But I want to tell you the story of one person who would talk to us.

[PJ Vogt]

Please.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

In the world of royal servants, there

[PJ Vogt]

are few more controversial figures than Paul Burrell.

[Heidi Blake]

I think Paul is a fascinating character

[PJ Vogt]

as Diana, as butler and footman to

[Garrett Graham]

the Queen, he served the royal family

[PJ Vogt]

for over 20 years. Only one man in history.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Chapter five, the chatty butler Paul Burrell

[Heidi Blake]

spent 20 years working alongside the royal.

[PJ Vogt]

He started as a footman to the Queen before becoming Princess Diana's butler, regularly crossing paths with Prince Philip.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

So this is a person that came up in multiple conversations that we had both on and off the record. And it's a guy who's kind of infamous in British tabloids. He was Diana's former butler, and after her death, he kind of presumably sees an opportunity and kind of cashes in on his access to the royal family when the entire world is obsessed with Diana and the circumstances surrounding her death. And so he writes a book about his time working on staff for Diana, which he did without royal approval, which I think is a big no, no. And so, you know, even now, like 30 years removed from Diana's death, or however long it is. Like, he's still taking, like, lots of media opportunities to talk about his time in the royal household. And in interviews, he speaks with this kind of like high school theater drama.

[PJ Vogt]

I feel her presence and she's often in my dreams. I don't live in a mausoleum to Diana. I live in this world and my life has changed as well. But you can never forget the people who touched your heart.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

All this to say, he seems like the perfect candidate to tell us what the swimming pool at Buckingham palace looks like.

[PJ Vogt]

So you reach out to him.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

So I shot him an email and after a couple of weeks, an agent got back to us, which is kind of unusual for a search engine booking request. Like, we're not used to dealing with agents, like it's a podcast. But let me just read you the message that the agent sent me, please. Hi, Garrett, I hope you're well. Many thanks for your inquiry, spelled with an e. And apologies for the delay in getting back to you. Can you please let me know what fee you have for the recording? Many thanks.

[Garrett Graham]

Of course.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And of course, by fee, that agent means that we need to pay money to do an interview with the butler. And at search engine, I think most journalists in the US we don't pay for information, meaning we don't pay sources to talk to us.

[PJ Vogt]

It's like a generally accepted norm. There's exceptions. There's people who either just do it, like I think tabloids will do it, and actually in a lot of documentary film, they won't pay someone for an interview, but they'll like, pay them a lot of money for their childhood photos and then ask them to also be interviewed, which is kind of a workaround. But like, generally speaking, there's this idea, rightly or wrongly, that you don't pay sources for interviews because the idea is that once you're paying somebody to say something, you both have power over them, which may or may not be a problem, but also they have an incentive to say what you want to hear.

[Garrett Graham]

Right.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

But I should also say, like, there does seem to be like a real non malicious cultural difference here, which is just like there are different boundaries in different countries around journalism. And one of those differences in the UK is that reporters are a bit more comfortable offering sources, like some compensation for information. Like, I found some poll Data saying that 53% of reporters in the UK believe paying people for confidential information is justified on occasion, compared to 5% of journalists in the US.

[PJ Vogt]

One can't help but notice that it's there's very few generally agreed upon ethical rules for journalists in the United States. And one of the few that we all seem to abide by is the one that involves us getting to be cheap. So if you told me that, you know, in the more progressive and sophisticated

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

future, we realized that this rule didn't

[PJ Vogt]

make a lot of sense, I'd be like, yeah, okay, sure.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And on the other, like, this is. This is also just a guy who has sustained an entire career off of selling the information that he does have. So, like, it shouldn't be totally surprising that he's asking for this. Like, in some ways, it's a perfectly reasonable request. But the agent ends up offering us the butler for £1,500, which is like £2,000. We politely decline, but actually it was okay, because this is around the same time that we're about to fly to England.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Chapter 6. American tourists in London.

[PJ Vogt]

So we weren't going there to report

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

this story, per se.

[PJ Vogt]

We were going there for another commitment. Like, Schurzha didn't been invited to speak at a podcast conference, but we'd said yes because we knew that Buckingham palace was in England.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And honestly, like, it's funny that you say it that way, because that is kind of the extent that I thought about it. I was just like, oh, it's over there. Like, we'll be closer to the object of our reporting.

[PJ Vogt]

Garrett, is that. What is that little tan building to the right of the palace?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

I don't think that's the swimming pool.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, damn.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Maybe honestly, it's a little embarrassing, listening back to this, that we just kind of hopped on the tube and went to Buckingham palace without a reporting plan. I mean, we're walking towards it. I suppose we'll get more information.

[PJ Vogt]

But that's not the pool.

[Garrett Graham]

No.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Well, the pool has glass on the outside.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, right. This looks a little more mausoleum y.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

We show up, there is a massive crowd. There's like a royal marching band, like, playing brass instruments as we walk by. But bad news was, like, the reason why it was such a madhouse outside of the palace gates, we quickly realized, was that we happened to be there in a month when the palace was closed to tourists, which meant for us that we weren't going to be able to get inside of the palace.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay, we're past around sort of. Would you say this is the back of Buckingham Palace?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

We're on the. Oh, gosh, let me get my directions down. So we walk around the perimeter of the palace. Literally, like, looking at my phone's Google Maps to like, see how many feet we were away from the indoor pool. As the crow flies, we're 249ft away

[PJ Vogt]

from the building that supposedly has a swimming pool at it.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Google Maps is giving me a route.

[PJ Vogt]

You'll be very bloody by the time you're there. There's also security and we were trying to figure out, I think this was your idea.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Let's from the exterior, be as close

[PJ Vogt]

to the pool as we can.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

I just wanted to know if we could see it, like if there was some gap in the shrubbery that would allow us, like a glimpse of the building in. In real life.

[PJ Vogt]

It was a noble idea.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

There wasn't.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

There wasn't.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

It sounds nice though. There's nice birds chirping.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, yeah. On the other side of the wall.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

I'm sure life's great.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

People, people are swimming, hanging out.

[PJ Vogt]

What have you just heard somebody yell with a British accent?

[Heidi Blake]

Cannonball.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

So that was attempt number one, which was in May. But honestly, I personally left feeling not that disheartened because I knew I was going to be back in London because I had a friend getting married there in August, and so I knew I'd have another shot. And also August happens to be a month that Buckingham palace is open to tourists. And so I booked not one, but two palace tours while I was going to be over there.

[Heidi Blake]

Welcome to Buckingham Palace. Please pay attention whilst we give you some useful information so you can make the most of your visit.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And I show back up my second time at Buckingham palace in the last two months. And the first tour I had booked was like the actual inside of the palace, as much of the interiors that they'll show to visitors. And so I walk up the side entrance and I go through what's pretty much airport style security.

[Heidi Blake]

Before you pass through our airport style security, please remove anything metal or electronic from your pockets.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

There's metal detectors, there's bag screeners. There's an announcement that no photos will be allowed inside the palace. But I put my iPhone in the front pocket of my shirt so I can talk to myself and take notes as I'm walking through the palace, audio diary style. And so I enter the palace, I walk down what's actually kind of like a dingy hallway that's poorly lit that pretty quickly opens up into the fancy part of the palace. Okay, we are officially inside the palace. It's very quiet in here. And the first thing I see is the inner courtyard, which is the first time you get a sense of just how massive this place is, I think it's something like a football field in both length and width.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And so you get shuffled along from there into what they call the grand hall, which is exactly what it sounds like. And the tour more or less proceeds as you would expect. I mean, you're going through the state rooms, which are the fancy rooms that have historically been open to the public. And they're all filled with impossibly expensive looking decor. A lot of gold. A lot of gold. And maybe the coolest grandfather clock I've ever seen. Honestly, I had the feeling like I was walking inside of Ashley Hicks's book.

[PJ Vogt]

It's funny, as you're describing it, I was like, this is exactly my mental image of it. And then I remember, like, yes, you have a mental image because you've looked at photos of this. Did you feel like had you walked past a hallway with like a little velvet stanchion in front of it, had that hallway had a door with the word pool on it, you would have been tempted to just book?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

I definitely thought on multiple occasions, like, I think I can outrun some of these guys. There were like secret looking doorways off to the side. I was curious where some of these things went. I think that they mostly just lead to servant corridors where food and other items get ferried through the palace that visitors can't see. So I'm kind of shuffling somewhat quickly through this first tour because the second tour is in the back gardens and the back gardens is where the building that we're interested in sits. Like the back of the palace is where the swimming pool is. So then I show up to the sign that says this is where the second tour starts. And I'm about to start the garden tour, which you won't believe happens to start directly in front of the swimming pool.

[PJ Vogt]

Seriously. So can you see through the windows?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

I was standing on the steps. Obviously I'm walking directly up to it to try to look in, but it's very opaque, two way glass.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

My assumption is you're inside the pool and you can look out on the beautiful back gardens of Buckingham palace, but from the outside you cannot see anything. The panes just look ink stained squares

[Narrator/Documentary Voice]

of glass,

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

which was honestly so tantalizing. Like a quarter inch of glass is what was separating me from the answer to this question that I had been

[PJ Vogt]

thinking about for months. Frustrating.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

It was so frustrating. And to make matters worse, we start the second tour and the tour guide, who's like this kindly British woman from Essex with long gray hair and the first thing she says is if you look to your right, there's the indoor swimming pool. I've actually swum in it.

[PJ Vogt]

What?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

The new king has actually turned down the temperature a few degrees, so I'm swimming in it less. But there's the pool house right there. And so for the rest of this 90 minute tour, I'm thinking the whole time, please say more about the swimming pool. Please say more about the swimming pool. Please say more about the swimming pool. But instead, she's pointing out, like, the rare shrubbery that they have lining the gardens, and she's pointing to the rose garden and the marmalade plants and the tennis courts, which are actually kind of cool, if a little dingier than I would have expected. And at the end of the tour, I'm kind of trying to play it cool, but I go up to her and I ask, like, hey, you mentioned that you had swum in the Buckingham palace swimming pool.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Like, I'm so curious, what's it like in there? And she tells me, it's just a normal swimming pool. Four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there are any accidents. There's a squash court in there as well. And immediately gets drowned out by, like, hordes of other people on the tour asking her questions about the rose garden and marmalade plants. And that's the only information I get from her.

[PJ Vogt]

Wait, four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there's accidents?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

I don't have any, like, decoder ring to interpret these words. These are just the precious few words that I gleaned from this, like, wealth of information before she was cut off from me forever. Okay, so what we had here was like, I mean, as you said, the mission was to bring the swimming pool, like, one more moat into the light of public view. And I feel like we'd done that. And so I talked to Shruthi and we were like, yeah, I think we have enough to answer the question. Like, we know enough to answer Kris's specific question. It's just a normal swimming pool. Like, not some fancy marble swimming pool. But at this point, we still didn't know why it was a secret.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah. The world we understand is fundamentally unknowable. But you want to think that, like, some things could be known.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

So I went back to LinkedIn.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And this time, instead of just searching for the keywords Buckingham palace in swimming pool, I searched for the keywords Buckingham palace and podcast.

[PJ Vogt]

What?

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

And it turns out there's one former employee of Buckingham palace who also has a podcast, of course.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, my God. Of course.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The thing that is wrong with the world, which is that there's too many

[PJ Vogt]

podcasts, is also the thing that's right

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

with the world, which is that if

[PJ Vogt]

you have a question, you can find someone who likes to answer questions into a microphone.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

Of course, the suspect we were looking for the whole time was another podcaster.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The worst kind of criminal there is.

[Garrett Graham (continued)]

So we're going to talk to him tomorrow.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Chapter seven, Secrets of the palace.

[PJ Vogt]

Hello.

[Garrett Graham]

Hi, pj. How are you?

[PJ Vogt]

I'm good. How are you doing?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Very well.

[Garrett Graham]

I've never done anything like this before, but so it's exciting.

[PJ Vogt]

I am excited to be talking to you. It's been a long journey to get here.

[Garrett Graham]

I hear there's a lot that goes into these episodes. By the sounds of it, you go really deep on really niche topics. I had to look at some and listened to a few since Garrett messaged me. So, yeah, yeah.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

I mean, you are the person at

[PJ Vogt]

the bottom of our rabbit hole this week.

[Garrett Graham]

That's usually where people find me, to be honest.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

This is Hrithik Karya, host of the podcast Football for Sale, which is actually about soccer, and also a former employee of the royal household.

[PJ Vogt]

What did you think about the palace before you worked there?

[Garrett Graham]

I think you have a really weird relationship with it growing up in the uk. Like, you sort of see it as this place that is shrouded in a lot of mystery, and most of the time you see it is just on the TV when the royals are coming in and out of it. I don't think a lot of British people actually do go inside of it, because you sort of just walk by it and you're like, oh, that's just there. And when I got the job, I was actually. That was the first time I'd ever been inside. And then as soon as you go inside, you're like, this place is insane.

[PJ Vogt]

And how did you end up working there?

[Garrett Graham]

It was during my first year of university, and my dad said, you need to get a job over the summer because university holidays are much longer than school holidays. So he was like, you need to get a job. You're 19 years old. Do something with your life. So I was like, okay. Literally went on Google search summer jobs in London. And it was the first thing that came up, and it was the last day of applications. And so I just really? Yeah, yeah. It literally just said, like, retail assistant, Buckingham Palace. And I was like, okay, sure. And so I just put in an application, actually went to the palace for my interview and then got a call a couple of days later saying, yeah, we want you to come and work here.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

So In July of 2019, Hrithik showed up for the first day of his royal summer gig.

[PJ Vogt]

And so what was your official title once you began?

[Garrett Graham]

It's not glamorous, it was just Retail assistant. When Buckingham palace opens in the summer for guests, they have a shop, like a temporary pop up shop. I say temporary, it's a massive structure that they put in the garden, but only for those three months. And you go and work in the shop in the garden for three months, sort of just like as a retail assistant, but like quasi tour guide as well, because people still, obviously you do get a bit of background and people still want to talk to you about it when they're in the shop.

[PJ Vogt]

And did it feel like, you know, you described the title as unglamorous. I've worked in retail jobs before and I didn't find it too exciting. Did you feel more like I'm working a retail job at Buckingham palace or did you feel like I'm working a

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

retail job at Buckingham Palace?

[PJ Vogt]

Like, did the specialness of the palace permeate your days?

[Garrett Graham]

I think you don't see it until you do something else. So that was the first job I'd ever had. And then I went and worked the year later at my local Tesco's, which is like your supermarket. Yeah, supermarket. And I was doing like fruit and veg, so I was doing food stuff. And at that point I was thinking I was like, a year ago I was working in Buckingham palace. And then it hits you and you're like, wow, I got 11 of access to this place that. That most people in their lifetime will never get. It's also the thing I can like hold over my family members a lot, which is quite fun.

[PJ Vogt]

And when you started working there, did anyone ever give you a talk about secrecy and privacy? Like what you were allowed to say about what you saw and what you weren't or what questions you should answer and what you shouldn't?

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, so there was a lot about that. Right. Cause obviously you're working for this institution that a lot of people wouldn't know about. So obviously I'm not going to sit here and give you like a walkthrough of exactly how many steps it takes to get from one place to one place and exactly what doors you have to go through to go from one place to another place. Obviously I can't do that. I think also a lot of it was about like journalism and the media. Because the entrance we go in and out of was obviously known as being the entrance that people who work there will go out of. And they said, like, people will see you, people will know that you work there, and they don't care what you do or the fact that you just work in the shop. But don't answer questions like, if people want to come and ask you about stuff, go and talk to us. As you may know, with the Royal Family, there's always a story about them in the papers. So, for example, when I was working there, there was one particular scandal that was going on at the time, which I will let you figure out which one it was, because it was quite a big one that I think people still talk about today. Involved a man from your homeland.

[PJ Vogt]

And what time period was this?

[Garrett Graham]

This was 2019.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay, you're talking to the most royals dumb person, perhaps in North America, but. Okay, but there was an ongoing scandal that everybody but me knows about.

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, there was an ongoing scandal about a man in America who owned an island and one of the particular British royals.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, a man who owned an island.

[Heidi Blake]

Okay, I do know that one.

[Garrett Graham]

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

In case you're as slow as I am. This was a scandal that involved a man whose name rhymes with Efri Jepstein.

[Garrett Graham]

So we got a big talking to you about if anyone, even if they are just like, seemingly a customer in the shop, says anything about that, you do not say a word.

[PJ Vogt]

You're like one of the guards with the fuzzy hats.

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, you could do that. Or you'd just be like, nothing and you just move on. Because what people will do is they will say, a royal spokesperson said this.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, so if you. 19 years old, working a job that you found off Google, if you were being indiscreet and I were buying a royal tea set and I asked you and you were like, I don't know. It sounds pretty messed up though. Then if I worked for a British tabloid, the next day I would say, royal spokesperson says scandal.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Pretty messed up.

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah. That's the risk that you're playing with.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

It made sense that even an employee as junior as Hrithik had been media trained, because after all, there was treasure hidden in the palace. Information, valuable information that could be pillaged by traitorous butlers, raiders who left the palace with novel facts about the royals private lives, an easy way to make a living. Hence these rules. But Hrithik was willing to talk to us not for money, but not for gossip, but because, frankly, he'd sussed us out. And he could tell we legitimately had zero interest in the royals or in their private lives, that we had only ever really wanted to know about one thing.

[PJ Vogt]

What can you tell me about the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace?

[Garrett Graham]

The actual question.

[PJ Vogt]

Yes.

[Garrett Graham]

So, yeah, it's weird. Like, there is one like. Like, I think that that's the main thing you like. You wouldn't have thought about it.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, I've thought about it. Have you. Have you seen it?

[Garrett Graham]

I have seen it.

[PJ Vogt]

You've seen it with your own eyes?

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, well, yeah, because generally when people work in government or in those kind of positions is because you work in such secure sites, a lot of the facilities you need are on site. So it makes sense that the people who work there get access to a swimming pool and a gym, so you don't have to leave the site to go and do it. And it's. I think whoever put this question in may not like this answer, but it's just a swimming pool. Like, it's a tiled surface with a swimming pool in the middle of it with changing rooms and a gym attached to it in a building.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

It took a moment to sink in that the Parthenon with windows building, where we'd imagined a spacious swimming pool surrounded by space and light and generously poured poolside Negronis. We'd imagine that as a royal pool that sometimes the family allowed their staff to swim in. Hrithik was saying, no, this is the staff pool and the attached staff gym with amenities like what you'd find at your local ymca. That is what was hidden behind the impenetrably dark glass.

[PJ Vogt]

When you say just a swimming pool, like, I open the door.

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

I walk in, just like, what do I see?

[Garrett Graham]

You are at your local gym with the swimming pool.

[PJ Vogt]

And are people swimming, like, on a day where you walk in? Or they're just like. There's. So you're saying people work at Buckingham palace, they're just swimming in the pool?

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, if you wanted to, yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

Did you swim in the pool?

[Garrett Graham]

No, I didn't join the gym because I wasn't living close enough to the palace to make it make sense.

[PJ Vogt]

But you could have.

[Garrett Graham]

I could have, yeah. Yeah. That was why we went there, because they were like, oh, you can join this gym if you want to, but, yeah, I could have done.

[PJ Vogt]

And is there a diving board?

[Garrett Graham]

No. Diving boards are very American.

[PJ Vogt]

There isn't like, diving boards are American. We fought a war for a diving board.

[Garrett Graham]

You know, there's like, little, like, springy. You're talking about Those springy diving boards? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, we don't have them.

[PJ Vogt]

I'd heard the rumor there's a squash court in the house with the pool, which would make sense because of the gym. Is that true?

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

And tell me about the gym.

[Garrett Graham]

It's just, again, it's just pretty. It's a government funded gym. It's the basics that you need in the gym. It's got your machines, it's got your free weights, it's got your treadmills and other cardio sort of machines.

[PJ Vogt]

It's not like this is the leg machine from like King whatever, the fourth, and it was liberated in this war. It's like that part of the palace breaks the rules of everything. Is Buckingham palace in Buckingham Palace?

[Garrett Graham]

Yes.

[PJ Vogt]

Our research found that apparently in 1970, Buckingham palace was registered as a grade one building, a designation meant to preserve buildings of quote, exceptional architectural, historical or national significance. The provision would, among other things, prevent some future mad king from tearing out Buckingham's Corinthian columns to make room for a Jacuzzi or a nice flat screen. Everything had to be kept more or less as it was, including the swimming pool, which was not very old or beautiful after the Nazis bombed it. It'd been rebuilt sometime in the 1950s, and in 1970 when the grade one listing was issued, it froze in time.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

An unremarkable municipal swimming pool with an attached gym.

[Garrett Graham]

Like if you wanted to fancy gym, I'd go down to the Equinox or something.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, we have Equinox here.

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, if you wanted a fancy gym, go there.

[PJ Vogt]

So funny. My friend who's so curious about this pool, he has a pool in his apartment building, which I've seen. His pool is probably better than the Buckingham palace pool.

[Garrett Graham]

Is it New York, right?

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, New York. Like a nice New York apartment building?

[Garrett Graham]

Yeah, New York. He's probably got a nicer pool than the Buckingham palace pool. Yeah.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The invisible wall had fallen. We could finally see what was on the other side. Most human beings begin asking questions at around 2 years old. But as adults we learn to be more judicious in our question asking. We learn, for instance, that if we ask a question and get silence in return, we may have crossed a line and that we should consider retreat. Search engine had spent months asking a simple question and had had to fight and wheedle to get this simple answer. And I still wanted to know the five year old's lament.

[PJ Vogt]

Why?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Why was it like that?

[PJ Vogt]

But wait, okay, here's my. I think this is my Last question for you. I still feel like one thing I do not entirely understand.

[Garrett Graham]

Go for it.

[PJ Vogt]

Many parts of Buckingham palace are, you know, have been photographed, have been shared with the public in some way or another. I still don't get why, if the pool at this point in its life is just like a staff pool that would look like the pool I would see at the ymca. Why do you think it's shrouded in as much secrecy as it is? Like, there are no pictures of it online.

[Garrett Graham]

So there's very strict rules about pictures and people taking pictures. Like when I was inside the palace, you're not allowed to take a picture. You're not allowed to send a Snapchat to your mates. You're not allowed to record something funny that happens at lunch with your colleagues. You're not allowed to like, pick up a FaceTime call. So that's probably the reason why I'd say, like, I think part of it is like, if there's no reason for there to be a picture of it, there isn't gonna be one. And I don't think that there is a reason for there to be a picture of it.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

There was another thing, a less neutral, less polite reason. We'd been blocked and it had less to do with the question and, and more to do with who it was asking it.

[Garrett Graham]

Okay, there's not really a nice answer here. I will go back to my time in the palace and it's like whenever there were Americans in the shop, I was sort of just like, no, not this again. Like, this is just so much like talking. It's like, sharp, like, I don't care. Like, I think this is where it gets a bit like, funny where, where you guys may not take this one, there is a level of like, you assume that they have a level of like, superiority. I say mine's a confusing situation because I'm obviously, you know, ethnically not British. I think you can probably tell. But like, growing up here, you still get that of like, oh, we left you. And do you know how many times I heard that on a daily basis?

[PJ Vogt]

Really?

[Garrett Graham]

At the palace of. Of America's. Yeah. Oh, we left you. And like, haha, like, oh, look at this tea. We threw it in the harbor. And I'm like, I don't care. Like, I honestly don't care. I was like, if I hadn't opened my mouth, you would have thought I was just an Indian guy. So now that you found out I'm British, suddenly you're going to talk to me about throwing tea in a Harbour mate. I honestly don't care. So I think that's probably where that comes from, especially around the royals, because I think the British are very protective. Even if you don't like them, a lot of British people are very protective about. Conversations of the royals should only occur between British people.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

So this was the answer. Why had the pool been kept a secret from me? Perhaps because I was a loud American and the legions of British people who we'd emailed likely held in their hearts a prejudice about my ilk. They thought that we only asked questions about the royals because we thought their royals were kind of dumb. Our national identity, after all, began with the idea that monarchy was stupid, that a taxpayer funded palace might represent a civilization unevolved. We might ask questions, but the Brits suspected we did not seek to understand. We were here to tease, maybe as a way of feeling better about the faults in our own system with its nepotism, its corruption, its occasional January riot. America had broken up with England two and a half centuries ago. We had a country of our own. Why were we still bothering them with our childish questions?

[Garrett Graham]

I think your question was, it was a really interesting question, but I don't like. I think you guys were like, maybe expecting like this really sort of extravagant answer and it was literally probably the most boring answer that you could have got to a question about like, what's the pool like? It's like. It's just a pool, mate.

[PJ Vogt]

That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed what you heard, if

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

you enjoyed anything you've heard recently on

[PJ Vogt]

our show, if we kept you company,

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

if we gave you something to talk

[PJ Vogt]

about at a dinner party, please consider signing up to be a paid member to support our work. You can get a subscription at Search Engine show for our incognito mode tier. You get ad free episodes, bonus episodes and discounts on our upcoming new merchandise. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinamaneni. This episode was produced by Garrett Graham. Fact checking by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support by Noah John and Sean Merchant. Our executive producer is Leah Rees Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Mora Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hillary Schaff. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode.

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[PJ Vogt]

Really? At a playground? Yeah.

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