Yearning for history - Telegraph If asked to show a foreign friend round London, who would count Kensington Palace as a sight that simply must be visited? Yet its tall, elegant rooms saw extraordinary psychological dramas, none keener than those of Victoria's teenage years, on the eve of her coming to the throne - her resistance to the suffocating schemes of her mother and, while weakened by typhoid, to the wicked bullying of Sir John Conroy's attempt to become the power behind the throne. Here, early one morning, "in my dressing gown and alone," she heard that she was queen, and, on the first day of her reign, had her bed moved from her mother's room. The lovely Red Saloon - where, still "quite alone," the 18-year-old held her first Privy Council, amid the craftiest politicians - was recently the place where visitors left their umbrellas and were met by "people asking you to turn off your mobile phone." This off-putting entrance has been transformed, along with the rest of the palace, by the engaging Lucy Worsley, the chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces. "A historic house should entertain," she learnt, as she writes in the first of our weekly History Pages, in Weekend. So it will. The appetite for history has never been sharper. People find that, just as family history makes them realise who they are, so too do local history and the history of our islands. Only those who know who they are can act as adults. Luckily, finding out is fun.