A lovely day at the seaside

Since it was a nice day on Monday and still a public holiday, I decided to head down to Brighton for the day. Miles and Lauren had some stuff to do so I headed down myself on the train. The trains are a little complicated as different train companies run the lines. This means that you have some options with tickets. It’s cheaper to buy a return ticket with the same company but this means that you must come back to the same station that you left from. If you want to be able to return to a different station or with a different company, you need to get a different ticket which is about 4 pounds more expensive but gives you more flexibility. And for some silly reason in England, a return ticket is only 10p or so more expensive than a one way, so they punish you for one way journeys.

I jumped on the train at London Bridge and it takes about an hour to get down to Brighton. It had been a bit grey in London but it was gloriously sunny in Brighton. I headed straight down the main street towards the beach. The beach is made of pebbles which is strange for an Aussie and was covered in little striped deck chairs and very white English people taking their clothes off for the first time since last summer. There weren’t many people swimming though as the water was freezing. I put my feet in so that I could say that I’d been in the North Atlantic but I didn’t stay wet for long. It’s really harsh on your feet standing on the medium sized pebbles and it took me ages to get further up the beach to put my shoes back on again. It’s fantastic not having your socks fill up with sand though!

I headed past Brighton Pier but didn’t go in as it was full of screaming teenagers and was quite expensive. 

You can walk for a good couple of miles along the front of the beach (or catch the little train if you’re too lazy) and there are possibly 400 fish and chip shops along the front of the boardwalk. It seems to be the only thing to eat on the beach. I wasn’t too keen on the greasy smell so stopped for some icecream instead (it seems that having a soft serve is the other thing that you do in Brighton) and wandered along for a while. Eventually, I turned around and headed back towards the centre of town and the Brighton Pavillion. 

The Royal Pavillion is in a little park in the middle of Brighton and was built by George the Prince Regent as a beach house. I wandered around the outside for a little while. When it was built they thought that it looked very Chinese but I guess the man who designed it only bothered to go as far as Indian and figured that no-one would know the difference. 

By the way, the slightly dodgy looking toilets in the park are actually really clean on the inside so are fine to use. 

It’s 8.80 pounds to get into the Pavillion and this includes the audioguide. It seems like a lot as it’s not a huge building but it is completely worth the entry fee. 

The first room that you enter is described on the audioguide as “simple” and you think this is wrong until you see the rest of the house. The interior goes with the Chinese theme (though is more authentically Chinese than the exterior) and the first room is decorated with dragons and green silk. You then enter into the long gallery which opens into all the ground floor rooms. It has two fake bamboo staircases at each end which lead to the upper floors. The room is done in pink, blue and green and has lots of temple dogs and chinese vases along the walls. It’s the best kept example of Chinoiserie (that’s the French version of fake Chinese) in England. 

The Banquet hall is one of the highlights of the place. George liked a good party and his feasts were legendary. The middle chandelier (yes there are five in the room) is of a giant dragon and is over 30 feet long and weighs a ton (and would be really really hard to dust). The table is set with the full set of crockery and cutlery and crystal glasses as well. At his feasts he would serve up to 100 dishes. This room seriously out glitzes the baroque!

Next door is the early 19th century kitchen where the feasts were prepared. It has a fireplace big enough to roast a whole cow. It has a strange display involving many stuffed birds (including a swan) and rabbit and all the other things used to prepare the feasts. They’ve also got hundreds of copper pots of all shapes and sizes. It’s not a completely plain room either as the roof is held up by palm trees. It has an automated 5 level rotisserie which was state of the art when it was put in and saved someone having to sit there and rotate the birds manually. They also had an early version of a bain marie which was a stainless steel table that had steam from the boiler pumped into it to keep the dishes on the top hot while waiting for serving. 

Next door to the Banquet hall on the other side is a gallery which was used for sitting after dinner. It was decorated in the 1820s though none of the current furniture is original. It has a very interesting screen that was used to block the heat of the fire from the ladies’ faces. Make up had a bees wax base at the time and melted very easily in the heat. Lots of ladies came to the house in Brighton as George was a bit of a ladies’ man.

The Saloon is currently being redecorated but has a little exhibition about how they do that. Next is a room that was used for dancing and music. The carpets could be rolled up to allow dancing on the wooden floor. It seems very flash but is nothing once you go into the next room. The music room has a dome which is lined with gilded cockle shells (26,000 of them in fact), nine chandeliers, silk curtains and stained glass windows. The carpet has dragons woven into it and was hand made for the room. There is even an organ built into the wall. They used to make so much mess at George’s parties that instead of cleaning the carpets, they would just shave the top layer of wool off them instead. This meant that they wore out faster and often had to be completely replaced. 

Then it’s through some of the little corridors built between rooms for the servants to move around without being seen. This leads into the rooms at the front of the pavillion which were used by George as a bedroom and living room when he got too old and fat to get up and down the stairs to his rooms up there. Then you loop back around to the long gallery and head upstairs. 

Upstairs has the toilets and the tearoom and the corridor next to them has a small section of the original silk wall coverings. It also has the bedrooms that were used during stays at the house. The Yellow Bow rooms were used by George and his brother when they were young and are very plain compared to downstairs. They have lovely view over the gardens of the pavillion. On the other side of the house (pretty much over the main entrance) is the bedroom that was used by Queen Victoria when she owned the house. There must be 10 or 11 mattresses on the bed (just like the princess and the pea). Next door is the little room that was used by her maid and the bathroom which is the same size as the maid’s room. 

Victoria was the last royal to use the pavillion as she sold it to the city of Brighton. She didn’t think that there was enough privacy as the grounds were so small and since she had six kids, the place was a bit crowded. She did take most of the original furniture and fittings with her when she left though. 

It is very cramped upstairs and there are lots of little steps between rooms. I think this is because of the uneven heights of the ceilings downstairs. You can’t take photos in the building but they do actually have some pretty good postcards in the shop and guide books as well. 

The very flash building across the park that is now the theatre and the museum used to be the stables of the pavillion. The park was a very popular place to be sitting in the sunshine and was pleasant if very noisy. 

I walked back up into North Laine which is home to the trendy shops and cafes of Brighton. It seems this is the home of vegetarians and vegans in England and virtually everything is organic. Lots of the places were starting to lose up for the afternoon and it was a bit cold in the shady streets so I had a quick look around before heading back down to the beach. I had some very unsatisfying greasy chips, bought some Brighton Rock (the famous boiled sweet) and walked back up to the station just as the sun was starting to fade. 

On the way back up the street I saw a great advertising sign outside a cafe that said that they had Australian trained baristas and the place actually smelled like coffee (a rare occurrence in England) so I suspect that you can get decent coffee in Brighton as well. 

I jumped on the train back to London and an hour later was getting off at London Bridge again and walked back into Bermondsey as it was still daylight.