Brighton’s Royal Pavilion honors Indian architecture

A crumbling onion dome and scalloped Mughal arches rose from the gray English coast last winter and stopped a journalist in her tracks. The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, built for King George IV in the late 1700s, is a flash of India on England’s south coast. The building is a relic of Britain’s colonial appetite: a seaside palace where British royals copied Indian architecture even as they ruled the subcontinent.

The pavilion’s story begins when the Prince Regent—later George IV—wanted a party house by the sea. He hired designers who borrowed onion domes, chhatri-topped towers, and lotus-flower chandeliers from Mughal palaces. The result was a palace that looked like it had been airlifted from Rajasthan. Queen Victoria later used it as a private retreat until the arrival of the railway brought crowds she called “the working-class masses.” She left for Buckingham Palace and took the lotus chandeliers with her.

During World War I, the building became a military hospital for Indian soldiers fighting for Britain. Separate kitchens followed caste rules, and Muslim troops prayed toward Mecca from the east lawn. The gardens, laid out for George IV, now breathe green life into the city and once hosted some of the first same-sex weddings after Britain legalized marriage equality in 2014. The pavilion has survived royal whims, an arson attack, and decades of wear—and it now welcomes the public as a museum.

What makes the Royal Pavilion striking is that it shows how empire flowed both ways: British rulers took Indian styles home even as they imposed their own architecture on India. The building is a reminder that Brighton’s faded grandeur once glittered with borrowed Indian motifs. It survived centuries of change and now stands as both a tourist draw and a quiet monument to cultural exchange.