JADM Day Five - Brighton

I left for Brighton today expecting to be thoroughly disappointed. That goes against my whole plan to eagerly look for and enjoy every adventure on this trip, but is probably truer to my cynical and pessimistic nature.

The only reason I wanted to go to Brighton was to see the Royal Pavilion, built by George IV when he was still just the Prince of Wales, before becoming Prince Regent due to his father's madness in 1810 [note: hopefully you're happy that I continue to give mini history lessons in these posts, but I'm unlikely to stop, particularly since if you came to this blog looking for scandal and salacious stories of a co-ed style rampage across Europe, you're in for a disappointment -- it's the Jane Austen Death March, kids, not the Love Parade]. The Prince of Wales originally went to Brighton with one of his mistresses on a holiday when he was trying to be 'economical', and stayed in a farmhouse because he was short of funds due to his rather profligate lifestyle. He fell in love with Brighton, bought the farmhouse, and ended up converting it into a small palace -- the farmhouse itself ended up becoming just one drawing room in the larger building.

As I said, I thought I would be disappointed -- but the Royal Pavilion is amazing. I couldn't take pictures inside, so I bought the guidebook for future reference. The outside, though, looks v. similar to some of the buildings I saw in India -- he was going for a fully 'Oriental' look, resulting in a chinioserie style mix of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese influences. So while the outside had domes and turrets similar to the Mughal architecture of northern India, the dining room was this extravagant 'Chinese' fantasy, with a giant sculpted dragon mounted on the ceiling to support a massive chandelier (with six or eight smaller dragons 'breathing fire' into lotus-blossom lanterns) over the thirty-person dining room table. The music room was even more impressive, with 26,000 gold-leafed scallop shells lining the inside of a domed roof, an organ with lacquered/japanned pipes, and an Axminster carpet so thick that you could sink into it.

I stopped in the middle of the tour to catch my breath from all the extravagance, and had a proper tea on the second-floor balcony overlooking the park below. It was a gorgeous day - no rain, approximately seventy degrees, and just like my Irish friends, when the weather's nice in Britain, it seems that every single English person able to walk gets out, finds the nearest piece of grass, and tries to get a tan. I ate my salmon and cucumber sandwich, my fruit scone with clotted cream and jam, and drank my tea, keeping a keen eye on the seagull that brazenly tried to steal my sandwich when I sat down. It was a really nice break, and a little surreal to think of how quickly things change - 200 years is really a historical blink of the eye, and I'm sure that when the Prince of Wales was entertaining his mistresses and cronies at Brighton in 1808, he had no expectation whatsoever that commoners (and American commoners at that!) would be tramping through his rooms and taking tea on his balcony someday.

I finished up the tour, bought the guidebook, sighed wistfully, and walked over to the Brighton Dome, a museum housed in the former stables of the palace. The stables were architecturally interesting as well, and not very stable-like, but I wasn't there for that -- instead, I went directly to their special exhibit on British chinioserie. There were lots of cool things there, and the guards probably thought I was strange for taking copious notes (no photography allowed). But the best thing was another epergne - this one was shaped like a pagoda, with a large bowl inside the pagoda. Then, there were four smaller mesh baskets suspended from 'branches', and four small plates supported by vines twining up from the feet of the pagoda. The whole thing was made of silver, and the craftsmanship was outstanding. Chinioserie was well on its way out of fashion when the Prince of Wales revived it in Brighton, but I could see use for some judicious chinioserie trimmings in the houses of characters in my future novels. My current hero's family is too pragmatic for such overblown decor, but I'm sure I'll have fussier families crop up in the future.

I made it back to London in time for a late dinner, took a shower, and planned what to do tomorrow. I had intended to go to Greenwich tomorrow, but the weather forecast for tomorrow looks fantastic, so I think I'm going to go to Bath instead. Then I need to start prioritizing what I must see vs. what I want to see vs. what is nice to see -- I technically want to see Greenwich, Dover, Canterbury, York, Oxford, the Battle of Hastings site, Kew Gardens, Salisbury/Stonehenge, more of the V&A, the Museum of London, the Soane museum, and some other random stuff, but I only have five days in which to do all of that (four, if I take tomorrow for Bath). Bah.

Okay, time for bed! I'll likely post pictures tomorrow, in case you care and/or are getting tired of reading such long posts.