Before the college, before the hospital, this riverbank was a Tudor royal palace. The site began as Bella Court, built in the 1430s by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV. It was confiscated by Queen Margaret of Anjou in 1447 and later rebuilt by Henry VII. Renamed the Palace of Placentia and known more commonly as Greenwich Palace, it became the favorite residence of Henry VIII - and his birthplace. Mary I was born here in 1516. Elizabeth I was born here in 1533. Three Tudor monarchs first opened their eyes within these walls. The palace fell into disrepair during the English Civil War. By 1694, with the exception of one incomplete building by John Webb, every brick of Greenwich Palace had been demolished. The Tudor era ended quietly, by demolition contract.

In 1692, watching wounded sailors return from the Battle of La Hogue against the French, Queen Mary II decided that England's seamen deserved what its soldiers had at Chelsea: a permanent home for the injured and aged. She ordered the creation of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich on the cleared palace site. Construction continued from 1696 to 1712 under Christopher Wren, who was working without fee, and after his death under John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. The architectural high points are two: the Chapel and the Painted Hall. The Painted Hall ceiling and walls were decorated by Sir James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726 - a nineteen-year commission that produced one of the greatest works of British baroque painting, an allegorical celebration of constitutional monarchy spread across 3,700 square metres of plaster.

The hospital closed in 1869, and in 1875 the remains of thousands of sailors and officers were exhumed and reinterred in East Greenwich Pleasaunce - sometimes called Pleasaunce Park - a few hundred metres east. Four years later, in 1873, the empty buildings were converted into a training establishment for the Royal Navy. For 125 years the Royal Naval College, Greenwich educated officers in everything from gunnery and engineering to nuclear propulsion. The college closed in 1998. The Royal Navy left. The Greenwich Foundation for the Old Royal Naval College, established in 1997, took over the site to conserve it and reopen it to the public.

In January 1806 the body of Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was brought to Greenwich. He had been killed at Trafalgar three months earlier, and his coffin - carried up the Thames in a barge that had once belonged to Charles II - was held in a small room here before lying in state in the Painted Hall. The country queued for three days to see him; the crush at one point became dangerous, and additional doors had to be opened. The little side room was reopened to visitors in 2005 as the Nelson Room. It contains a replica of the Nelson statue in Trafalgar Square along with memorabilia and paintings, and can be seen on the guided tour that also visits the undercrofts, the old skittle alley, and the crypt.

Since 1998 the site has been gradually opened up to the public, free of charge. In 1999 the University of Greenwich leased parts of Queen Mary, King William, and the whole of Queen Anne and the Dreadnought Building on 150-year terms. In 2000 Trinity College of Music leased King Charles. The grounds opened completely to visitors in 2002. The Painted Hall reopened in March 2019 after a three-year restoration that included unique public ceiling tours - visitors lifted on platforms to within arm's reach of Thornhill's brushwork. A service is held in the chapel every Sunday at eleven, open to all. And the buildings keep playing themselves and other places in film: The King's Speech used the courtyard as Buckingham Palace, Les Miserables filmed barricade scenes here, The Dark Knight Rises shot the closing cafe scene in the colonnades, and Pirates of the Caribbean, Thor: The Dark World, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and The Diplomat have all camped here. Hawthorne wrote in 1863 that the people are sooner or later the legitimate inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens create. Greenwich now belongs to whoever walks through the gates.