Royal Pavilion

It started as a cure, not a folly. The future George IV first visited Brighton in 1783 on medical advice — sea air and seawater bathing were thought to help his gout — and in 1787 he had the architect Henry Holland build him a fairly restrained neoclassical villa to stay in while he took the waters. Nothing about that first building hinted at what was coming.

Between 1815 and 1822, architect John Nash tore into Holland's discreet villa and rebuilt it as something closer to a fantasy of Mughal India transplanted onto the English south coast: bulbous onion domes, minarets topped with chhatris, cusped arches, all in a style historians now call Indo-Saracenic, an invented British idiom that borrowed the silhouette of South Asian and Islamic architecture without much concern for which tradition any particular feature actually came from. Step inside, though, and the theme changes completely — the interiors lean into chinoiserie instead, with dragons, pagodas and lacquer-inspired decoration in rooms like the Banqueting Hall and Music Room, so the building essentially wears two different, unrelated fantasies of "the East" on its outside and inside.

Queen Victoria hated it. Brighton had grown up around the pavilion by the 1830s and 40s, and she found the loss of privacy intolerable; she stopped using it, and the town council bought the building from the Crown in 1850 for £53,000, at the time an eye-watering price for what was essentially a used royal folly nobody in London particularly wanted. That purchase almost certainly saved it from demolition. Its strangest later chapter came during the First World War, when the pavilion was converted into a hospital specifically for wounded Indian soldiers serving in the British Army — a decision partly justified at the time by the idea that patients might find comfort in a building built, however inaccurately, in a style borrowed from their home regions.

Getting there

Located in Brighton. London Gatwick Airport (LGW) is about 37 km away.