258 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



have been admired (as it undoubtedly was at one time) 

 surpasses belief. Its cost, one shrewdly suspects — it is 

 supposed to have cost over £1,000,000 — was what 

 appealed to the imagination. 



That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord 

 Hertford whom one recognises as the " Marquis of 

 Steyne ' in ' Vanity Fair," admired it, as assuredly 

 did not rough-and ready Cobbett, who opines, " A good 

 idea of the building may be formed by placing the 

 pointed half of a large turnip upon the middle of a 

 board, with four smaller ones at the corners." 



That is no bad description of this monument of 

 extravagance and bad taste. Begun so early as 1784, 

 it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and 

 rebuildings, completed in 1818. with the exception of 

 the north gate, the work of William the Fourth in 1832. 



The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill- 

 informed enthusiasm for Chinese architecture, mingled 

 with that of India and Constantinople, and was built 

 as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the 

 Summer Palace at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. 

 It suffers nowadays, much more than it need do, from 

 the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious 

 scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance 

 with its style, would not only relieve the dull drab 

 monotone, but would go some way to justify the 

 Prince's taste. 



But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of 

 a certain permanence upon the princely and royal 

 favours extended to the town, whose population, 

 numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had 

 grown to 5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the 

 succeeding ten years it had more than doubled itself, 

 being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian 

 Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the 

 modern towns of Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen 

 in the present population of 161,000 — the equivalent 

 of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that in the 

 last year of the reign of George the Fourth. 



