Greenwich Hospital, London in the context of "Old Royal Naval College"

The Palace of Placentia, also known as Greenwich Palace,was an English royal residence that was initially built by Prince Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1443. Over the centuries it took several different forms, until it was turned into a hospital in the 1690s. The palace was a place designed for pleasure, entertainment and an escape from the city. It was located at Greenwich on the south bank of the River Thames, downstream from London.

On a hill behind his palace, the duke built Duke Humphrey's Tower, later known as Greenwich Castle; the "castle" was subsequently demolished to make way for the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which survives. The original river-side residence was extensively rebuilt around 1500 by King Henry VII. A detached residence, the Queen's House, was built on the estate in the early 1600s and also survives. In 1660, the old main palace was demolished by Charles II to make way for a proposed new palace, which was only partly constructed in the east wing. Nearly forty years later, at the behest of Queen Mary II, the Greenwich Hospital (now called the Old Royal Naval College) remodelled this wing, expanded, and rebuilt on the site.

Nicholas Hawksmoor (c. 1661 – 25 March 1736) was an English architect. He was a leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Hawksmoor worked alongside the principal architects of the time, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and contributed to the design of some of the most notable buildings of the period, including St Paul's Cathedral, Wren's City of London churches, Greenwich Hospital, Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. Part of his work has been correctly attributed to him only relatively recently, and his influence has reached several poets and authors of the twentieth century.

In classical architecture, the term attic refers to a storey or a parapet above the cornice of a classical façade. The decoration of the topmost part of a building was particularly important in ancient Greek architecture and this came to be seen as typifying the Attica style, the earliest example known being that of the monument of Thrasyllus in Athens.

It was largely employed in Ancient Rome, where their triumphal arches utilized it for inscriptions or for bas-relief sculpture. It was used also to increase the height of enclosure walls such as those of the Forum of Nerva. By the Italian revivalists it was utilized as a complete storey, pierced with windows, as found in Andrea Palladio's work in Vicenza and in Greenwich Hospital, London. One well-known large attic surmounts the entablature of St. Peter's Basilica, which measures 12 metres (39 ft) in height.

A bracket is a structural or decorative architectural element that projects from a wall, usually to carry weight and sometimes to "strengthen an angle". It can be made of wood, stone, plaster, metal, or other media. A corbel or console are types of brackets.

In mechanical engineering a bracket is any intermediate component for fixing one part to another, usually larger, part. What makes a bracket a bracket is that it is intermediate between the two and fixes the one to the other. Brackets vary widely in shape, but a prototypical bracket is the L-shaped metal piece that attaches a shelf (the smaller component) to a wall (the larger component): its vertical arm is fixed to one (usually large) element, and its horizontal arm protrudes outwards and holds another (usually small) element. This shelf bracket is effectively the same as the architectural bracket: a vertical arm mounted on the wall, and a horizontal arm projecting outwards for another element to be attached on top of it or below it. To enable the outstretched arm to support a greater weight, a bracket will often have a third arm running diagonally between the horizontal and vertical arms, or the bracket may be a solid triangle. By extension almost any object that performs this function of attaching one part to another (usually larger) component is also called a bracket, even though it may not be obviously L-shaped. Common examples that are often not really L-shaped at all but attach a smaller component to a larger and are still called brackets are the components that attach a bicycle lamp to a bicycle, and the rings that attach pipes to walls.