The Royal Pavilion: how to visit George IV's seaside palace

The Royal Pavilion is the reason a lot of people first come to Brighton, and it deserves the billing. It is a Regency seaside palace built for George, Prince of Wales, who became Prince Regent in 1811 and King George IV in 1820, and there is genuinely nothing else like it in England. The outside is a skyline of onion domes and minarets that owes more to Mughal India than to Sussex. The inside is stranger still. This guide is about how to visit it well rather than just walk through it.

What you are actually looking at

The Pavilion started as a modest farmhouse that the Prince leased in 1786 and had enlarged from the following year. It grew in stages, and between 1815 and 1822 the architect John Nash rebuilt it into the building you see now. The two rooms people remember are the Banqueting Room, lit by a vast chandelier hung from the claws of a silvered dragon, and the Music Room, with its domed ceiling of gilded scallop shells. The Regency kitchens, with their cast-iron palm-tree columns, are worth as much time as the state rooms. It is a building made purely for pleasure and display, and reading it that way makes far more sense of it than treating it as a normal stately home.

Tickets, timing and the audio guide

Book online in advance. Admission runs at around eighteen to twenty pounds for an adult, with concessions and family tickets available, though prices change, so check the current rate on the Brighton and Hove Museums site before you go. The audio guide is included in the ticket, and it does the heavy lifting of explaining why any of this exists, so use it rather than skipping past it. Allow a good hour and a half if you want to read the rooms properly instead of just photographing them. The Pavilion sits at the top of the Old Steine, a few minutes on foot from the seafront and the Lanes, so it slots easily into a day in the centre.

When to go

The Pavilion is a rare Brighton attraction that is entirely indoors, which makes it the obvious plan for a wet or blustery day, and Brighton has plenty of those. It is busiest on summer weekends and can sell out, so a weekday or an early slot is calmer. Winter is the quietest time to have the state rooms more or less to yourself. The gardens around the building, restored to their Regency planting, are free to walk through even if you do not go inside, which is a pleasant detour on any pass through the centre.

A building with a stranger history than it looks

The Pavilion has had an odd life since George IV. Queen Victoria disliked it and sold it to the town of Brighton in 1850, which is why the city, rather than the Crown, owns it today. During the First World War it served as a military hospital, most famously for wounded Indian soldiers brought from the Western Front, a chapter remembered now by the India Gate at the south entrance, given by India in 1921, and by the Chattri memorial on the Downs above the city. Much of the original furniture was removed over the years and has been returned or recreated in a long restoration, so what you walk through is the result of more than a century of patient work to put the palace back the way George IV left it.

Combine it with the museum next door

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery is in the former estate buildings a few steps away, sharing the same gardens, and general admission to its permanent collection is free. Its design and fashion galleries are genuinely good, and it is compact enough to see in an hour, so it pairs naturally with the Pavilion for a half-day of indoor Brighton. If you are building a full day, do the Pavilion and museum first thing, then drop down into the Lanes for lunch and out to the seafront in the afternoon.

Practical notes

Photography rules inside change over time and some rooms restrict it, so follow the signs and the stewards. The building is historic, with steps and level changes, so anyone with mobility needs should check the access pages before visiting. And remember the Pavilion is owned and run by the city rather than the Crown, unlike the royal palaces in London, which is part of what makes it such an unusual survivor. It is the single best hour and a half you can spend in Brighton on a grey afternoon.