Buckingham Palace

8 min read

Buckingham Palace looks as though it must have been the centre of the British monarchy for centuries. In fact, it is a surprisingly recent palace. It did not become the sovereign's principal London residence until Queen Victoria moved in in 1837, and the famous façade seen from the Mall is younger still: it was completed only in 1914. Queen Victoria never saw the front of Buckingham Palace that is now so strongly associated with her and the monarchy she helped define.

The story begins not with a king, but with an aristocrat. A substantial house had occupied the site by the seventeenth century, but around 1703 John Sheffield, later Duke of Buckingham, replaced it with Buckingham House, one of the grandest private houses in London. It was a large but recognisably domestic building, with a central block and projecting wings, standing at what was then the edge of developed Westminster. The palace has grown enormously around it, but parts of this original house survive within the building today.

There is an even older royal relic outside. James I had attempted to establish a silk industry here in the early seventeenth century by planting thousands of mulberry trees. According to the Royal Collection, the project failed because black mulberries were planted rather than the white variety preferred by silkworms. One surviving mulberry tree from the plantation still grows in the palace garden. It is an improbable remnant of the site two centuries before Buckingham Palace existed.

Buckingham House became royal in 1762 when George III acquired it as a private family residence for Queen Charlotte and their children. Significantly, it was not yet the official centre of the monarchy: that remained St James's Palace. Known as the Queen's House, Buckingham was intended to provide something closer to a home. George III commissioned Sir William Chambers to modernise it, while Robert Adam contributed sophisticated interiors for the Queen.

The transformation into a palace came with George IV. Few British monarchs spent money on architecture, furniture and decoration with quite his enthusiasm. In 1825 he commissioned John Nash to turn the relatively restrained Buckingham House into a royal palace capable of matching his ambitions. Nash expanded the central building and rebuilt the wings around a huge ceremonial forecourt. In its centre stood a newly designed triumphal gateway: the monument we now know as Marble Arch.

The result was theatrical even by royal standards. Nash had begun his career designing scenery, and something of the stage designer remained in his architecture. Inside, rooms progress dramatically into one another through columns, mirrors, gilding and richly coloured decoration. His Throne Room culminates in what is essentially a proscenium arch framing the throne, while the 47-metre Picture Gallery was created as a magnificent setting for George IV's collection of paintings.

George IV's taste, however, was considerably more impressive than his financial restraint. By 1828 Nash had spent £496,169 on the project and costs were far beyond what had been expected. George died in 1830 without ever living in his new palace, and Nash was subsequently dismissed. Edward Blore was brought in to finish the building more economically. George's successor William IV disliked Buckingham Palace sufficiently that he continued living at Clarence House. After the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, he even offered the unfinished palace to Parliament as a replacement. The offer was declined.

It was therefore an eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria who finally turned Buckingham Palace into the home of the sovereign. She moved in shortly after becoming Queen in 1837, against advice that she should wait at Kensington Palace while the building was made ready. For the first time, Buckingham Palace became not merely a royal house but the working centre of the monarchy.

It soon became apparent that the enormous-looking palace was not enormous enough. Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840 and their rapidly growing family had to coexist with courtiers, servants, offices and the elaborate entertaining expected of the court. In 1845 Victoria complained to Prime Minister Robert Peel about the "total want of accommodation" and the absence of a room large enough for major balls and concerts. The solution fundamentally changed the appearance of the palace.

Edward Blore built an entirely new eastern wing across the open side of Nash's forecourt, turning the palace into the quadrangle it remains today. In doing so he displaced Marble Arch, which was removed in 1851 and reconstructed beside Hyde Park. Much of the money for the new wing came from selling George IV's extravagant Royal Pavilion at Brighton, and some of the Pavilion's contents came back to London. Behind Buckingham Palace's restrained classical exterior are therefore unexpectedly exotic rooms filled with Chinese and Chinese-inspired furniture, porcelain pagodas and fantastical objects created for George IV's oriental palace by the sea.

Prince Albert also suggested something that would become perhaps the palace's most important architectural feature: a balcony at the centre of the new façade. Royal appearances there began in Victoria's reign; she watched soldiers leave for the Crimean War and later welcomed them back. The balcony was a remarkably effective piece of royal theatre. The monarch could remain physically separated and elevated above the crowd while simultaneously appearing accessible to it. That tension between distance and visibility remains central to the function of Buckingham Palace today.

The palace continued to expand. James Pennethorne added the great Ballroom and associated rooms in the 1850s, giving Victoria the enormous ceremonial space she had asked for. The interiors were considered remarkably fashionable: the architectural journal The Builder went so far as to call Buckingham Palace the "Headquarters of Taste". Yet the flourishing court came abruptly to an end after Albert died in 1861. Victoria withdrew from much of London social life and spent long periods at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral. By the end of her reign Buckingham Palace had begun to look neglected.

Her son Edward VII reversed this. Buckingham Palace once again became the centre of an intensely social court, and many rooms acquired the white-and-gold decoration still visible today. Outside, an even greater transformation was taking place. The Victoria Memorial, the Mall and the monumental gates around the palace were conceived as a vast memorial to the previous reign. Sir Aston Webb helped turn the area into the piece of imperial urban theatre familiar today: a great ceremonial route running from Admiralty Arch towards the palace, terminating in the gilded figure of Victory above the Victoria Memorial.

And this created a problem. Blore's nineteenth-century palace front was faced in Caen stone which had darkened and deteriorated in London's polluted atmosphere. Beside the brilliant white new memorial it looked particularly shabby. George V therefore commissioned Aston Webb to reface the entire east front in hard Portland stone. The work was carried out in 1913-14. Webb kept the basic arrangement, including Albert's balcony, but transformed its architectural character. The symmetrical, pale, rather stern elevation seen in almost every photograph of Buckingham Palace is consequently an Edwardian and early-Georgian remodelling of a Victorian wing attached to a Regency palace built around a Georgian house.

That complicated history is easier to understand from the garden. The western side of the palace still displays much more clearly the architecture of Nash's original scheme, with projecting pavilions, great Corinthian columns and a curved central bow. The familiar Mall façade can therefore be slightly deceptive: what appears to be one immense, carefully planned classical palace is actually the result of successive monarchs and architects repeatedly extending and remodelling what they inherited.

The same is true inside. George IV's collections from Carlton House survive alongside furnishings brought from Brighton Pavilion; Victoria and Albert enlarged and altered the ceremonial rooms; Edward VII imposed his white-and-gold Edwardian taste; and Queen Mary later tried to recover some of the Regency character that had disappeared. Buckingham Palace is less a perfectly preserved historic interior than an accumulation of changing ideas about how monarchy should look.

The building has also repeatedly been forced to adapt to events far outside its gates. During the Second World War Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times. On 13 September 1940 a German aircraft approached along the Mall and dropped six bombs around the palace while George VI and Queen Elizabeth were inside. Bombs struck the forecourt, quadrangle, garden and the private chapel. The King recorded seeing two bombs fall only around thirty yards away before the explosions drove him and the Queen into the corridor.

The bombed chapel was never restored to its former use. In 1962 Prince Philip proposed turning its ruins into the Queen's Gallery, creating a public exhibition space for works from the Royal Collection. It was rebuilt again and enlarged in the early twenty-first century and is now the King's Gallery. A room destroyed during the Blitz therefore became one of the ways in which a famously inaccessible palace began gradually opening itself to the public.

That process accelerated dramatically in 1993. Following the catastrophic fire at Windsor Castle the previous year, Buckingham Palace's State Rooms began opening to paying visitors during the summer. The income became an important part of financing Windsor's restoration: ultimately around seventy per cent of the necessary revenue was raised through admissions to Buckingham Palace. What began partly as a response to a financial and political problem has since become a permanent part of London's cultural calendar.

Behind all this ceremony is something that is remarkably easy to forget when standing among the crowds outside: the palace occupies the edge of a 39-acre walled garden, the largest private garden in London. Its lawns, lake and more than a thousand trees form an almost invisible landscape behind the building. From the Mall, Buckingham Palace presents itself as the formal termination of one of London's grandest avenues; from behind, it still has something of the character George III originally wanted from Buckingham House - a private retreat hidden from the city.

This is perhaps the most interesting way to understand Buckingham Palace. It was never designed in a single moment to become Britain's definitive royal palace. George III bought a family house. George IV tried to turn it into a spectacular work of art and nearly lost control of the cost. Victoria discovered it was impractical and built another wing. Edward VII revived it, George V replaced its public face, bombs destroyed parts of it, and later generations opened portions of it to millions of visitors.

What now appears to be an immutable symbol of monarchy is actually one of London's great architectural improvisations.