Cool, open-minded Brighton is a seaside city that knows about having fun. It’s the unofficial LGBTQ capital of the UK and home to more DJs than you can squeeze into an organic smoothie bar. But its reputation for fun goes back to the 1800s, when the Prince Regent bought a holiday house here and began turning it into an extravagant, oriental pleasure palace.
HEALTH AND FUN
The Prince Regent, who would later become King George IV of England, first came to Brighton as a very young man in the late 1700s. The town had just started to become popular as a health resort and the Prince’s doctors had recommended a stay. George bought himself a relatively small house near the sea and had it extended into a villa. He was fascinated by the Orient and began to decorate the interior of his new home with exotic furniture, sculptures and wallpaper imported from China.
EXPANSION
In 1811 George became Prince Regent (acting king) because his father, George III, was thought to be mad. The villa in Brighton was now not big enough for the large parties and dinners that George loved to host. So, in 1815, George commissioned well-known architect John Nash to begin transforming the villa into the magnificent oriental palace that we see today.
ORIENTAL STYLE
And it really is magnificent! Nash modelled his design on pictures that came from India, created by European artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On the outside the Pavilion looks a bit like an Indian cake. It has cream-coloured minarets and onion-shaped domes on the roof, so it’s an extraordinarily exotic building to find on the south coast of England. Thousands of people come to see the Pavilion every year. An entrance ticket gives you access to the magnificent rooms inside or you can simply enjoy an exterior view of the building for free from the beautiful gardens.
The oriental dream
The Royal Pavilion Brighton is an extraordinary building located in this small seaside city on the English south coast. It was transformed from a modest villa into an extravagant pleasure palace by the Prince Regent George in the early 19th century. The considerable reforms he made to the exterior and interior of the building reflected the European obsession with the East, although, as Dr. Alexandra Loske, a curator at the Pavilion, explained, it was a very mixed up vision of the Orient, containing many fantastical elements:
Alexandra Loske (mild German accent): It is Indian in parts but mostly it looks Chinese. And, again, we’re looking at something here that’s not authentic Chinese style but something that was created by Europeans, none of whom had travelled to India or China. And they were creating, about two hundred years ago, all these interiors that looked vaguely Chinese. So, with lots of dragons, lots of bells, lots of lacquered surfaces and intense colours and walls that look like lacquer but aren’t.
EXOTIC STYLE
And Loske went on to say more about why the Pavilion appears as it does:
Alexandra Loske: Perhaps it is because England was at war with France, so the French style was something that wasn’t quite acceptable at that point. But also, Brighton was his party place, this is where he [the Prince Regent] came to have a good time, to throw lavish parties and banquets and hold concerts. So, it was a party palace and therefore it could and perhaps should be more exotic and slightly outrageous and a little bit different to everything else.
THE ENTERTAINER
Everything in the Pavilion was designed to impress guests, said Loske:
Alexandra Loske: George was the ultimate, well, you know, entertainer, but he loved parties and he loved inviting people and he needed a place where he could do this, and I think everything in this building shows us this, everything is an expression of this. In fact, the whole building is designed for entertainment: the way you walk through it, the way the interiors get more and more colourful and more and more ornamented shows that this was all done for effect. He wanted to impress his guests. And the most lavishly decorated rooms are the ones where you eat and drink for hours, the banqueting room, and then where you listen to music and you dance, the music room.
NOT AMUSED
Queen Victoria, however, found the Brighton Pavilion not to her taste:
Alexandra Loske: She never really liked it, and it wasn’t so much the style. She liked the exoticism and the colour in the building. What she didn’t like was the location, Brighton itself. So, it wasn’t right for her. The railways had arrived in Brighton, bringing a whole lot of different people from a different background to Brighton. So, it became too busy. She felt hounded, she was hounded by the press, by people. And she decided she needed more privacy and bought herself a place on the Isle of Wight which would become Osbourne House, her holiday place. And she sold the Royal Pavilion.
GOOD USE
And, said Loske, during World War I the Pavilion played a surprising role.
Alexandra Loske: The kitchen was an operating theatre. The king and queen came down and kind of pretended that they had given up their home to be used as a hospital, which of course wasn’t true. But it’s still a remarkable episode in the Royal Pavilion’s history.
GLORIOUS AGAIN
Years of restoration work mean that now the public can once again see the saloon that George IV and his guests enjoyed in the 1820s. Loske described this magnificent room:
Alexandra Loske: The saloon is one of the three grandest state rooms, so there’s the banqueting room, the music room and then, in the centre, under that big bulbous dome, is the saloon, one of the oldest rooms of [in] the building. And we have brought it back now, after many, many years of first piecemeal restoration then, for the last six years of really focused restoration and recreation. We’ve brought it back to the interior design scheme of 1823. That was the most complete scheme, the final scheme under George IV.