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.

Podcast #1: The First Giraffe – featuring Alexandra Loske

Art historian and curator Alexandra Loske is researching her thesis and curating the upcoming Regency Colour exhibition. But she also uncovered the story that I’ve found perhaps most exciting so far.

If you know anything about my music, you may know I’ve had an obsession with giraffes for years – used them in songs, written about them and run photo streams of them. Meanwhile Alexandra, tasked with looking through a collection of old satirical cartoons, discovered several images of George IV including a giraffe, as if it was one of his toys. She started to research this and uncovered the first ever known giraffe in Britain, which was given to King George as a diplomatic gift by the Pasha of Egypt (the same fella who gave Britain the gift of Cleopatra’s Needle).

‘Twould puzzle a conjuror. Print, 1827.

I couldn’t pass it up. I interviewed Alexandra in the recently closed History Centre, to get her to tell this incredible story. It’s a doozy… for me, it felt like the best episode of In Our Time ever, although I do a horrible impression of Melvyn Bragg. What a way to kick off the podcasts.

Here’s a link to the audio podcast via Soundcloud. There will be more – and in the next few days I aim to publish podcasts to iTunes, which will enable you to subscribe – but I’m not quite there yet technically.

Chris T-T, Blogger in Residence

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