Guardsman and Grandeur: The History of Buckingham Palace

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Everybody in the world has heard of Buckingham Palace. The official London residence of the British monarch, it stands at the western end of St James’s Park, very near St James’s Palace.  As well as being used for great occasions of State, accompanied by the daily ritual of the changing of the guard, it was also somewhere that successive kings and queens lived when they were in town.  Now the decision has been made for HM the King to move out, giving Clive and John the excuse to consider its evolution as a work of architecture and changing taste.  

The architectural story begins in 1703 when the Duke of Buckingham commissioned a house from the soldier-architect William Winde.  Winde’s design for Buckingham House, published in Vitruvius Britannicus, would prove highly influential on the development of later Georgian country houses.  Little remains to be seen of it now but it set the scale for what came later.  In 1761 George III acquired Buckingham House as a private retreat for Queen Charlotte, to which he added several libraries for his famous collection of books: the foundation of the British Library.  George IV turned the house into a palace, persuading Parliament to commission John Nash for the purpose.  Nash produced a scheme that was both characteristically elegant in concept and slapdash in execution.  The old brick building was clad in Bath stone, doubled in size towards the garden front, provided with wings to either side of a central courtyard, whose termination was a triumphal arch – later moved to the top of Park Lane and called the Marble Arch.  Nash was by then an old man and the project ran hopelessly over budget.  By the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, it also looked impractical: there were too few bedrooms and nurseries.  Edward Blore to close the courtyard with a new East Front facing the Mall.  

When Victoria died in 1901, after a long reign and with the British Empire at its zenith, a fund was established to remember her.  This not only produced the sculptural composition of the Queen Victoria Memorial by the sculptor Sir Thomas Brock on a ronde-point (roundabout) in front of the palace but a revamp of The Mall culminating in Admiralty Arch by Sir Aston Webb – a set piece of imperial town planning.  There was even enough money to reface the east front of the palace – work that amazingly was carried out in three months while George V was at Balmoral.  Central is the most famous balcony in the world, on which successive generations of the royal family stood to wave to the crowd.

Presumably there will be less waving now, given the palace’s change of function – which is all the more reason to consider it as a work of architecture and art.