Up On The Roof

I felt curiously unmoved, staring out over Brighton from a new angle, standing on the roof of The Royal Pavilion, despite such beautiful crazy architecture, set off by bright sunshine and few clouds, making it a perfect morning to be mucking about up there.

Partly, we weren’t actually that high up, so the view itself was local rather than city-wide. More interesting was nosing through windows to see inside. Here’s a rare (and sadly blurry) view of the kitchen, seen from through the skylight. Several of these high windows have no way to open or close them, except to send a servant scurrying up onto the roof.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And you can’t really make it out in these photos but it was also possible to look down into a few other rooms, through lovely old coloured glass.

Nowadays, even most staff aren’t able to come out here, except on very rare occasions. It’s just not safe. And ultimately, even standing high on the roof, it is still far more striking to look up, not down.

Of course, the onions and towers of the Royal Pavilion are fundamentally illusion – facade – to be viewed from a distance; built onto and extended around a pre-existing (conventional) house. Stunning to see from down in the gardens or beyond, because they were designed that way: a building meant to create an unforgettable, iconic silhouette on the skyline, more than anything else.

Up here, they’re at a far more human-scale.

You can look at the joins and processes that plonked these follies on top of a normal(-ish) working building and you see the sheer effort required to keep it in decent nick, battling rain, wind, gulls, pigeons and the occasional human vandal.

Senior Keeper Tim Thearle (in the green jumper) brought a group of us up here and showed us around, explaining how they maintain the building. It’s a mammoth task.

Here is largest onion surface, viewed from inside.

Through a tiny wooden doorway, like something for Hobbits, we crawl inside the dusty bottom of the biggest onion, under the eaves that have held it up for close to 200 years.

Here there are piles of mostly wooden junk, some of which may be 80+ years old; pieces of carapace and decoration and ornament. Bits of abandoned history deemed not so important as the other bits, yet they’re equally historic.

During last winter pigeons got in here and it took months to get rid of them. There is nothing like piles of pigeon poo and abandoned decorative wood to humanise an iconic old building.

Down In The Tunnels

“You see down at the bottom of that shaft there, right? Yeah, just there. Biggest rat I ever saw in my life, it’s down there right now. Dead. But it’s huge.”

The workman holds his hands up apart like he’s saying he caught an enormous fish. “This big, I swear.”

Senior Keeper Tim Thearle, who is in charge of conserving all these historic buildings, including the work being done in the Royal Pavilion Gardens, nods his head in agreement. He saw it too.

This week I was lucky enough to join Tim’s (very rare, months in the persuading) internal staff-only guided walk along the secret tunnel that links the north end of the Royal Pavilion to the basement of Brighton Dome, going right underneath the Royal Pavilion Gardens.

One section is scaffolded.

None of it’s really safe yet but most of it feels exactly like I’d imagined; ancient air, uneven tread, with alcoves for artworks or (more likely) lighting.

Along the length there are five vertical shafts from the ceiling poking up 3-4 feet to the surface, which would’ve let in air and light. Originally these had round glass tops and in fact, just a few centimetres down in one of the flowerbeds in the gardens, one of these original shafts remains untouched.

The Dome was George IV’s ridiculously luxurious stables; horses living in far greater comfort than many local people, housed in a circle around the edge of the main dome building, with a common area in the middle. So the Dome is older than the Royal Pavilion – he built the stables first. Apart from bringing mistresses in and out through the tunnel, George also used it to go between the two buildings incognito, after he got so fat he was embarrassed to be seen by his subjects. Everything is connected in this town – our grubby seaside party atmosphere entirely inspired by our time as host for errant triple-x, heavy banquetting royalty. By the time George gave up on Brighton and retreated to a shack in the gardens of Windsor Castle, he was obese, gout-ridden and surrounded by his exotic pets, not long from death.

Currently you can’t exit both ends – even if you walk all the way to the Dome end, it’s still locked: I snuck downstairs at the Dome end to get this dim pic of their entrance. Dome staff store their bikes in the entranceway.

The ultimate goal (obviously) is to enable public tours down this tunnel. However, quite apart from making it structurally safe and protecting the tunnel itself long-term, they also need to figure out logistics of how to let people in, since neither exit is anywhere near a public area of Dome or Royal Pavilion buildings.

I’ve been obsessing about tunnels since I first arrived. Here’s my first photo (from a few weeks back) of when it was first revealed from above by renovation work. Even though it’s obvious – with hindsight – what this is, I loved that it’s not marked and many people are walking by this repair work every day with no idea what they’re looking at. I’m so glad I stumbled on it by chance, rather than being told by experts.

They’ve now added layers of protective polystyrene and soft pipe covering, as well as a side wall to help take the load (big trucks park in this area because of concerts and productions in The Dome)… and today it’s all been waterproofed as well.

When they finish working on this section, they’ll dig up the next section – nearer to the Royal Pavilion – and continue until they’ve preserved the whole lot.

Chris T-T, Blogger in Residence

Traditional Kachin Houses

‘Nung houses at Nhkum ga, and girls pounding rice in the porches.’ Photograph by James Henry Green, 1926

For Kachin people the house-building process was socially and culturally meaningful. Ola Hanson, author of Kachin Customs and Traditions (1913), noted that house-building was seen as a ‘communal affair’. He reported that when a person wanted to build a house he would first get the timber from the forest. When all the materials were ready he would call his neighbours and fellow villagers to help him by using drums, gongs and cymbals. Then the neighbours and villagers would come and help to build the house. When it was done, a celebration would be held.

Nowadays, this process is gradually vanishing and many Kachins (especially the younger generation) are not aware of this tradition. Moreover, when modernised houses appear as popular and ideal houses, the traditional houses fall out of favour.

‘Atsis roofing house’. Photograph by James Henry Green, 1920s

In the 1990s Kachin elders from Myitkyina, capital of Kachin State, told how a ‘Dumsa’ (an animist priest) would divine where a new house should be built. He would take soil from where the main post of the house should be placed. Historically, the Kachins built two types of houses called ‘Daw Hpum House’ and ‘Daw Gam House’ depending on the type of post used (‘daw hpum’ or ‘daw gam’). Broadly speaking, it was customary to build different types of houses for ‘magam’ (the authorities), ‘duwas’ (village chiefs) and ‘darat daroi’ (normal civilians). The classification of a house, however, depended on the governing system of a particular village.

Photographs taken in north-eastern Burma by James Henry Green in the 1920s show different types of Kachin houses in different villages. Looking at these photographs one can imagine how the process house-building was, for Kachins, culturally and socially meaningful.

‘Porch of Triangle Chief’s house. Showing Madai Nat. P.R.’ Photograph by James Henry Green, 1926

My name is Gumring and I am a member of the Kachin ethnic community of Burma. Facing many current political challenges and uncertainties, Kachinland is located in north-eastern Burma, between India and China.

I was awarded a scholarship from the James Henry Green Charitable Trust for my postgraduate studies at the University of Sussex. Currently I am working on the James Henry Green collection of photographs and textiles relating to the Kachin community in Burma. This is my first blog about this collection, which is cared for at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.