Decline

Queen Victoria was not thrilled by the Royal Pavilion or it’s design. “The Pavilion is a strange, odd, Chinese looking place, both outside and inside. Most of the rooms are low, and I can only see a morsel of the sea, from one of my sitting room windows.” She instead chose Osborne as her seaside residence and in 1845 order that the Pavilion be dismantled with all the furnishings to be sent to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. By 1850 the Pavilion became a shell of its former glory. The Board of Woods and Forest removed all the remaining fixtures and decorations, tearing off the skirting boards in every apartment in the palace to take down the glasses, breaking away large masses of brickwork to remove the fireplaces, tearing up the flooring with pickaxes and ripping the exquisite Chinese paper from the walls. The Royal Pavilion was now a derelict and one of the most unique buildings in Britain faced demolition.

References

Tim Lambert, A Brief History of Brighton, Sussex, www.localhistories.org

Clifford Musgrave, The Royal Pavilion (Royal Pavilion Committee, 1954)

Regina Scott, Brighton's Shining Star: The Royal Pavilion, nineteenteen.blogspot.com/2009/09/brightons-shining-star-royal-pavilion.html