Royal Pavilion

In December 1914, the domed rooms of the Royal Pavilion were converted into a military hospital for Indian Army soldiers wounded on the Western Front. The kitchens that had once served George IV’s celebrated banquets were adapted to provide food appropriate for Hindu and Muslim dietary requirements. Sikh soldiers recovered in the Music Room beneath its famous lotus-pendant chandelier. The arrangement lasted until January 1916 and treated more than 2,000 patients. This episode, which most visitors to the Pavilion know nothing about, says something important about the building. It was always more than a pleasure palace.

The Royal Pavilion in Brighton began as a modest farmhouse leased by George, Prince of Wales, in 1787. He was 24, still a decade from the regency that would give the era its name, and Brighton had only recently become fashionable as a sea-bathing resort. His physician had recommended salt air and seawater for his gout. The real attraction was probably more straightforward: Brighton was 50 miles from London, beyond the reach of his father’s court, and his companion Maria Fitzherbert was already established there.

What started as a neoclassical marine villa was rebuilt in stages across three decades. John Nash, the architect responsible for much of Regency London, was commissioned in 1815 to transform the building into its current form. Nash borrowed from Mughal architecture: bulbous onion domes, minarets topped with chhatris, cusped arches, and a roofline that looks from certain angles as though it belongs on the banks of the Yamuna rather than the English Channel. The interior, designed primarily by Frederick Crace and the less-celebrated Robert Jones, went further still, mixing chinoiserie, Indo-Saracenic ornament, and an operatic scale that was entirely at odds with the building’s modest exterior plot.

The Interior

The Banqueting Room is the most immediately spectacular space in the building. The ceiling rises to a vast painted dome decorated with plantain leaves and a central flying dragon, from which hangs a chandelier weighing approximately a ton, itself held by another dragon. The room was designed to host the legendary dinners at which the Prince Regent, advised by his chef Marie-Antoine Careme (one of the founders of classical French cooking), demonstrated that England could eat as well as France. The kitchen that supplied these dinners is one of the earliest large-scale professional kitchen designs in Britain, with innovative steam-heated cupboards and cast-iron columns disguised as palm trees.

The Music Room next door has a similarly theatrical ceiling, dome-shaped with gilded scales and painted in yellow and crimson. In 1975 an arson attack badly damaged the room. It was closed for eleven years while restoration proceeded. Then in the storm of October 1987, a stone ball was dislodged from a minaret and fell through newly restored plasterwork. The restoration continued. The room you visit today is the product of around 50 years of cumulative repair and has been described, with some justification, as one of the finest examples of decorative arts restoration in Britain.

The History After George IV

George IV died in 1830. His brother William IV used the Pavilion occasionally. Queen Victoria visited nine times before deciding she preferred Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, partly because the crowds on Brighton’s seafront made it impossible to take the air without being watched. She sold the Pavilion to Brighton Corporation in 1850 for 53,000 pounds, taking most of the furnishings with her to Windsor and other royal residences.

Brighton stripped the building further and used it variously as a concert venue, a base for the town’s fire brigade, and a reading room. In the 1950s, Queen Elizabeth II made a permanent loan of more than 100 items of original furniture and decorative arts from the royal collections, accelerating what had been a slow process of restoration. The building has been restoring itself toward its George IV-era condition ever since, with individual rooms reopening over decades. The process is not finished. Parts of the interior continue to be worked on.

Visiting Practicalities

Adult tickets are currently priced at around 19 to 22 pounds, with concessions for seniors and students at roughly 16 to 18 pounds. Children between 5 and 16 pay a reduced rate, and under-5s enter free. Online booking is recommended, particularly in summer and during school holidays, when the building’s capacity means queues can form at busy periods. The Pavilion is open from approximately 09:30 to 17:45 in summer (April to September) with last admission at 17:00, and shortened hours in winter.

Audio guides are included in the admission price. Guided tours run on selected dates and must be booked separately. The garden surrounding the Pavilion, restored to its Regency design with a mix of formal planting and open lawn, is free to enter and makes a reasonable warm-weather alternative to the queued main entrance.

Brighton Beyond the Pavilion

The Lanes, a network of narrow alleys immediately south of North Street, are the commercial heart of old Brighton. The passageways are filled with independent jewellers, antique dealers, bookshops and coffee places, and the density of independent businesses is notably higher than in comparable English coastal towns. On weekday mornings before the tourist flow builds, they are genuinely pleasant to walk.

The Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, immediately adjacent to the Pavilion in the Royal Pavilion Gardens, has a strong Art Nouveau and Art Deco collection and a local history section that contextualises Brighton’s rise as a resort town. Admission is free for Brighton residents and currently around six pounds for visitors, though this should be confirmed before visiting.

The beach is shingle, which surprises people who have not been before. Brighton beach with pebbles rather than sand is a reasonable description of the English seaside at its most characteristic. The pier, the amusement arcades, the fish and chips, the cold grey water: none of it is spectacular and most of it is enjoyable. For the best fish and chips, leave the pier end and walk east along the seafront toward Kemp Town, where the tourist markup decreases.

Getting There

Brighton is 50 minutes to an hour from London Victoria by fast train, and around the same from London Bridge. Trains run frequently throughout the day. Driving from London is slower and parking near the Pavilion expensive and limited. The train is the obvious choice.

A Final Note on the Building’s Meaning

The Royal Pavilion tends to be described as an eccentric folly or a monument to Regency excess. Both descriptions are accurate and neither is fully sufficient. It is also a document of early 19th-century British fascination with Asian aesthetics, processed through European chinoiserie and Orientalism in ways that are now understood differently than they were when the building was new. Visiting with that in mind, the rooms become more interesting rather than less. The wartime hospital use adds another layer. What looks like pure hedonism turns out to have a more complicated history, which is generally the case with buildings that have been standing for two centuries.