Royal Pavilion

George, Prince of Wales, first came to Brighton in 1783, aged 21. The seaside town had become fashionable through the residence of his uncle Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland, with whom the young prince lodged at Grove House and whose taste for fine cuisine, gambling, the theatre and general fast living he shared. His physician had also advised him that the seawater and fresh air would be good for his gout.

In 1786, under a financial cloud with Parliament investigating the extravagances he had run up building Carlton House in London, the prince rented a modest former farmhouse facing the Old Steine, the grassy area of Brighton that visitors used as a promenade. Remote from the royal court, the house made a discreet setting for private liaisons with his long-time companion Maria Fitzherbert. Her Roman Catholic religion prohibited his marrying her under the Royal Marriages Act 1772; he had wished to marry her, and did so in secrecy.

In 1787 the prince commissioned Henry Holland, the designer of Carlton House, to enlarge the existing building. The result was the Marine Pavilion, in which the old house became one wing flanking a central rotunda holding three main rooms - a breakfast room, dining room and library - fitted out in Holland's French-influenced neoclassical style with decorative paintings by Biagio Rebecca. A new dining room and conservatory followed in 1801-02 to designs by Peter Frederick Robinson, who worked in Holland's office. The prince bought up the land surrounding the property, and between 1803 and 1808 a grand riding school and stables were built there in an Indian style to designs by William Porden, providing stabling for 60 horses; the range dwarfed the Marine Pavilion it served.

By the time John Nash began work in 1815 the prince had been Prince Regent for four years, and he succeeded as George IV in 1820 while the building was still going up. Between 1815 and 1822 Nash redesigned and greatly extended the pavilion, and it is his work that is visible today. He carried to Brighton the structural experiments of his Rotunda at Carlton House: the tented roofs of the Music and Banqueting Rooms used a laminated timber system he had developed with his assistant William Nixon in 1814, in which specialised iron connectors allowed the roofs to span the ceremonial rooms without central supporting columns. Nixon, who had designed the Rotunda's divided tie-beam truss, went on working with Nash at Brighton until his death in 1826. The interiors were primarily the work of Frederick Crace and the little-known decorative painter Robert Jones, drawing heavily on Chinese and Indian fashion, and the finished palace is a prime example of the exoticism that offered an alternative to the more classicising mainstream of Regency taste.

George IV died in 1830. His successor William IV also stayed at the pavilion on his frequent visits to Brighton, but Queen Victoria disliked the town and the lack of privacy there, complaining that "the people here are very indiscreet and troublesome". Brighton became accessible to Londoners by rail in 1841, which increased its popularity with the masses, and the pavilion was in any case cramped for her growing family. She purchased an estate and land on the Isle of Wight, redeveloped as Osborne House, which became the royal family's summer home.

After Victoria's last visit to Brighton in 1845 the government planned to sell the building and grounds. The Brighton Improvement Commissioners and the Brighton Vestry petitioned successfully for the sale to go to the town instead, and the pavilion changed hands for £53,000 in 1850 under the Brighton Royal Pavilion Act 1850. The proceeds helped fund the furnishing of Osborne House. Many of the pavilion's original fixtures and fittings were removed on the order of the royal household at the time of the sale, most ending up in Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. The town used the building as assembly rooms, and in 1860 the adjacent royal stables were converted into a concert hall, now known as the Brighton Dome. In the late 1860s Queen Victoria returned large quantities of unused fittings to Brighton.

During the First World War the pavilion, along with other sites in Brighton, was transformed into a military hospital. From December 1914 to January 1916 sick and wounded soldiers of the Indian Army were treated in the former palace, among them several Indian recipients of the Victoria Cross: Khudadad Khan, Darwan Singh Negi, Shahamad Khan and Mir Dast. The hospital also took in the adjacent Dome and Corn Exchange, both formerly part of the large stable complex. It was set up with two operating theatres and over 720 beds, and more than 2,300 men of the Indian Army were treated there.

Elaborate arrangements were made to cater for the patients' variety of religious and cultural needs. Nine different kitchens were set up in the grounds so that food could be cooked by the soldiers' fellow caste members and co-religionists; Muslim soldiers were given space on the eastern lawns to pray facing towards Mecca, and Sikh soldiers a tented gurdwara in the grounds. The imperial government highlighted the hospital as showing that wounded countrymen of British India were being well treated, and with the official sanction of the state a series of photographs was made to show the state rooms converted into hospital wards. Lord Kitchener visited the soldiers in July 1915 and King George V in August of the same year, presenting military honours to several of them, Mir Dast among them.

The military hospital for Indian soldiers closed at the end of January 1916, after most of the British Indian Army had been withdrawn from the Western Front in France and redeployed to the Middle East. The pavilion reopened as a hospital in April 1916, this time for "limbless men" - British soldiers who had lost arms and legs, usually from amputation - where alongside treatment of their physical needs a great emphasis was placed on rehabilitating them by training them in skills and trades. It operated until the summer of 1920, when the building was returned to Brighton Corporation. George V and Queen Mary sent back more of the palace's furnishings after the war. In 1921 Bhupinder Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala, unveiled a new gateway in Indian style commemorating the pavilion's role in treating injured Indian soldiers during the war.

Since the end of the Second World War the municipality has worked to restore the pavilion to its state at the time of George IV, encouraged in the 1950s by the permanent loan of over 100 items of furniture from Queen Elizabeth II; rooms have been restored, stud walls reinstated and replicas made of some original fittings and occasionally of pieces of furniture. The building was listed Grade I on 13 October 1952. Many of the items in the palace are on loan, in particular from the King.

Brighton's purchase turned a private residence into a public attraction under civic ownership, and around 200,000 people now visit each year. The pavilion is licensed as a wedding venue, and on 29 March 2014 it hosted one of the first legal same-sex marriages to take place in the United Kingdom following the 2013 Same Sex Couples Act. The Royal Pavilion Garden, restored to Nash's original Regency vision, is listed Grade II on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens; Historic England deemed it at risk in October 2017, its original character blighted and overshadowed by fencing, litter bins, signage and lighting, and Brighton and Hove City Council opened a public consultation on the gardens' future. A list of over 20,000 crimes and anti-social behaviour incidents at the gardens, including indecent sexual behaviour and drug abuse, was reported to the council in 2017, raising the possibility of fencing them off and closing them at night. In 2020 management and operation of the Royal Pavilion & Museums buildings and collections were transferred from Brighton & Hove City Council to a new charity, the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust.