Royal Pavilion reimagined in new book

The beautiful 272-page book, richly illustrated with more than 250 colour images — including brand new photography and Georgian-era watercolours and drawings published in full for the first time — brings to life the colourful designs of King George IV’s seaside pleasure palace, from his obsession with silver to his love of all things fantastical and opulent.

All that glitters
Built between 1787 and c.1822, the Royal Pavilion was George IV’s audacious tribute to beauty, indulgence, and imperial fantasy. Famed for his flamboyant tastes and love of luxury, the king transformed a modest seaside villa into a dazzling fusion of English Regency splendour and fantastical Indian- and Chinese-inspired designs. Today, it stands as perhaps the most spectacular expression of the Romantic imagination and Britain’s fascination with India and China.
Fittingly, beneath the dust jacket lies a flourish of extravagance: a reproduction of the palace’s original Chinese wallpaper, echoing the fantasy within.

Talking about the new launch, Loske says:
“Bringing together my long-standing passion for the Royal Pavilion’s exquisite interiors in this book was a true joy. George IV had the wealth, vision and imagination to realise whatever his heart desired, and the results were nothing short of spectacular. I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to his obsession with silver surfaces, which was one of his great indulgences. Remarkably, much of it has survived intact or has been expertly restored — an extraordinary rarity, given how easily silver tarnishes or disappears over time.

“It was an honour to be invited to write this book. It truly captures the splendour, playfulness, and sheer theatricality of the Royal Pavilion — and I hope it is a perfect tribute to one of Britain’s most extraordinary buildings, and to an extraordinary man.”

Historian and television presenter Sir Simon Schama says:

“Alexandra Loske’s beautifully written, magisterial work on the Royal Pavilion at Brighton is itself a pleasure palace: deeply learned but also enchanting to read; not just on the flights of dragons, the eye-popping colour and the mutations of design, but more illuminatingly on contemporary taste in the Regency; how the fantasy by the sea was received and how this most delirious of projects was the creation of a British culture, far from insular but drunk on what is imagined to be oriental passions.”

The Royal Pavilion, Brighton: A Regency Palace of Colour and Sensation is available from the Royal Pavilion’s shop in Brighton and online at Yale University Press. Priced at £35.