Inside the wildest, most extravagant wing of Buckingham Palace
In the 1920s, Queen Mary and her decorator searched the royal storerooms for hidden treasures as they redecorated. They were not disappointed.
I’ve got bad news for anyone hoping to peek inside private areas of Balmoral Castle or the East Wing of Buckingham Palace — tickets sold out in the blink of an eye.
Don’t despair. Royal watchers are confident that this year’s offerings are a sign of more to come. “This is very much the start of something bigger,” confirms royal biographer Robert Hardman in an email when East Wing opening was announced. “Not sure of the timescale but there will be more.” In Hardman’s book, The Making of a King: Charles III and the Modern Monarchy, an official explains that the aim for Buckingham Palace is to follow in the “maximum-flexi” model of Windsor Castle, which is largely open to tourists and only closes rooms or state apartments as needed for royal receptions.
That new, more public model is expected to kick in for the London base of the monarchy after the 10-year “reservicing” (a top-to-bottom renovation) of Buckingham Palace ends in 2027. “The aim is to open it as much as possible throughout the year,” the official told Hardman. “It may not be on the scale of summer opening but we can do weekends, we can do private tours. It’s all down to the set-up. So, you might have a big reception for the King one evening but you want that room open to the public the next day.”
There has always been a keen interest to see inside royal residences, especially parts usually off limits to tourists. Public tours of Buckingham Palace started in August 1993 as a way to raise funds to repair the fire-ravaged Windsor Castle. The opening was instantly popular, but was such an experiment that the palace even sold annual coins to commemorate the summer openings that could only be purchased at the end of the visit (if I remember correctly). I was able to go in both 1994 and 1995, and was so taken with the designs and their packaging that I got them framed.
Then, tickets cost eight pounds (the equivalent of 16.50 pounds today, or CAD$28, roughly half the full adult price today). The whole operation was decidedly bare bones compared to today’s more sophisticated arrangements. There were no audio guides in multiple languages or specially themed exhibitions — instead tourists had to rely on floorplans and photos in the thin official souvenir guidebook if they wanted to do more than gawk at the treasures.
By the late 1990s, it was clear that the summer openings were a permanent fixture. The tourist money from the opening of Buckingham Palace as well as other official residences, including Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, had turned into a steady stream of income for the Royal Collection Trust, the charity established in 1993 to oversee the fabulous arts belonging to the Crown and which runs the the public openings of official royal residences. Still, the non-profit has to balance the costs of such openings to the public (hiring and training staff, etc.) against the income generated by those activities, while also focusing on its main goal of preserving the Royal Collection for future generations. And that brings us to this year’s offering.
The East Wing of Buckingham Palace is like an elaborately layered, tasty confection hidden underneath a plain icing for behind the austere facade of the balcony side of the palace are rooms and corridors decorated with some of the most sumptuous treasures in the Royal Collection. And it’s that layering of centuries of bold, even esoteric, royal design choices that makes this part of the palace so fascinating.
The wing didn’t exist when Queen Victoria moved into the palace after becoming monarch in 1837. Soon, the deficiencies of the existing palace became apparent to the monarch, who told Sir Robert Peel of the “the total want of accommodation for our little family which is fast growing up.” In addition, Victoria wanted “a room capable of containing a large number of those persons whom the Queen has to invite in the course of the season to balls, concerts, etc.”
The solution was to remove the Marble Arch from the palace entry to a corner of Hyde Park and build the East Front, which closed in the Quadrangle. The work was done in 1847-49 and, aside from a refacing in 1913, the exterior hasn’t changed.
The sale of George VI’s exuberant Royal Pavilion in Brighton helped finance the East Wing. In addition, some of its Asian contents, including ceramics and furniture, were shipped from the seaside residence to the East Wing, where they inspired the overall design of its rooms.
And then there’s the influence of Queen Mary.
The grandmother of the late Queen Elizabeth II loved design and boldly put her mark on the historic residences and collections of the royal family. She dismantled tiaras to create new ones; she moved the pearls that once topped the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara to her new Lover’s Knot Tiara. She turned Frogmore House in Windsor Home Park into the royal version of a souvenir museum, filled with odds and ends collected by generations of royals, including one room filled with her extensive collection wax and silk flowers under glass domes. She couldn’t stop.
Her “one great hobby” was the re-arrangement and conservation of royal residences, according to her official biographer James Pope-Hennessy. “Now, in the post-war epoch of flux and doubt and dissolution, it seemed to her more than ever imperative to garner and preserve every tangible remnant of the history of British royalty. She was forever matching up, cataloguing, re-organizing and adding to the historical parts of the Royal Collection.”
So, in the 1920s, she turned her attention to the East Wing. With her decorator, Sir Charles Allom, she combed royal storerooms looking for items to be brought to life once again. She hung the walls of the Yellow Drawing Room with the most beautiful Chinese wallpaper that had been used in the saloon of the Brighton Pavilion by interior decorator Frederick Crace in 1816 (the wallpaper was removed when George IV decided he wanted a gold-and-red theme to the room.) The design is described in a 1931 book, Buckingham Palace: Its Furniture, Decoration, and History by Clifford Smith, as “a representation of a Chinese garden with blossoming fruit trees and flowering shrubs, fantastically plumaged birds and brilliant butterflies.”
The spine of the East Wing is the Principal Corridor, which Queen Mary had painted celadon green. The walls of the 240-foot long corridor were hung with royal portraits. Some of the prized furniture collection comes from the Chinese Drawing Room in Carlton House (which was torn down in the mid 1820s as architect John Nash and George IV turned their attention to expanding what would become Buckingham Palace). And Queen Mary herself added pieces to the East Wing collection, including buying a Chinese lacquered cabinet designed for the export market in the 18th century, according to Smiths’ book.
The corridor was also lined with Indian ivory-veneered chairs and sofa that were originally a gift from George III to his wife, Queen Charlotte. They were not inherited but rather bought by their son and heir, George IV, in 1819 after his mother’s belongings were sold by Christie’s auction house. The entire sale, which lasted 35 days and included the sale of a “superb assemblage of jewels,” realized more than 50,000 pounds (3.75 million pounds today).
The most spectacular room in the East Wing is the Centre Room, from which the royal family steps onto the most famous balcony in the room. Queen Mary redesigned it in around 1922. From those famous royal storerooms, she secured still more wall hangings, this time finding six panels of “Chinese imperial yellow silk embroidered with landscape scenes, possibly ones sent by the Emperor of China to Queen Victoria on her Diamond Jubilee in 1887,” explains Ashley Hicks in his 2018 photo book, Buckingham Palace: The Interiors. “These were hung on the walls from gilt poles within Chinese fretwork, like the rest of the room mixing old pieces from Brighton with new work created by the Queen’s decorator Sir Charles Allom. Curtains were made using old Chinese embroideries found in the stores.”
Queen Mary wasn’t done with the Centre Room. She presented the Royal Collection with a circular table and four chairs decorated with black lacquer and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Though the workmanship is Russian and dates to around 1800, the design consists of “Chinese figures and landscapes,” according to Smith’s book (the table is in front of a window to the far left of the above image).
If there is a motto that could describe Queen Mary’s love of design, it may be the Latin phrase, “Sic situ laetentur lares” (The Household Gods delight in such a situation), which was the motto inscribed by the Duke of Buckingham upon the front of the Old Buckingham House, site of the future palace that Mary loved so much.