If you're only going to indulge in one bit of sightseeing on the Isle of Wight, make it Osborne House. Its history, size and sheer magnificence leaves everything else on the island in its wake. If you're a fan of the British royal family and their palaces, it justifies a trip to the island just to see it.
No other British royal palace gives you such an intimate, personal connection to its builders. Most layer the tastes and additions of successive generations. The Royal Pavilion at Brighton gets very close to the mind of George IV, but this is even better. George outsourced his desires to others to make real, and spent a relatively brief time living in the result. Victoria and Albert were personally involved with every aspect of Osborne from the foundations up and used this as a beloved family home for decades.
Most of the building is Albert's design, brought to life by London builder Thomas Cubitt. The royal couple took painstaking care with the interiors, many of the prized pieces being birthday or Christmas presents they gave to each other over the years. Little has changed since Victoria died, though almost everything has been beautifully restored over the past 30 years. (The palace was grand, but precariously shabby, when I first visited in the late '80s.)
It's the combination of intimacy and grandeur that makes Osborne worth visiting, but do brace yourself for the price. Unless you're an English Heritage member, adults are £18.50 each. I think it's worth it.
Though it seems impossibly grand to modern eyes, this was meant to be an intimate family home for The Queen, Prince Consort a growing brood of children that eventually numbered nine. If you're familiar with London's Pimlico or Belgravia, both packed with Cubitt buildings (and a very fine gastropub named after him), this is actually easy to see. Osborne is an over-sized Italianate villa of the same type the affluent upper middle classes were building for themselves in London. Vast servants’ quarters in the basement and at the back, practical working rooms on the ground floor, grand entertainment spaces on the first, grown up bedrooms on the second and the children tucked away in a nursery right out of Mary Poppins or Peter Pan up top.
To contemporary eyes it would have been bold and modern. Albert turned his back on the "safe" style of Roman neo-classicism to embrace an eclectic mix of Greek revival and Italian Renaissance. The interiors are vividly colourful and barely a square inch is left undecorated. If your personal tastes veer towards Scandi minimalism, this place may make you a bit queasy.
Furnishings and a vast array of collectibles show off the couples' love of history and high culture: bronzes and marbles reproduce the most famous works of antiquity; paintings show significant events from the past; micro-mosaics, glass and porcelain celebrate the best modern workmanship. There's a stunning Venetian glass chandelier here that looks like a flower garden has exploded into a mushroom cloud in the centre of the room. Ironically, the surroundings are so lavishly decorated that it just fades in.
It's not all high culture, however. Victoria's watercolours from the couple's travels hang next to old masters; the equivalent of holiday snaps. Paintings of peasants and everyday genre scenes balance the worthy subjects. One of my favourites is an Italian peasant girl, more striking in her natural beauty than all the portraits of queens and princesses.
The modernity included electricity, some of England’s earliest flushing toilets and plumbed baths, and a clever “U” shaped dining, lounging and billiards suite which anticipates today’s passion for open plan living. There was an important reason for the last, however. In this innovatively-shaped room, the court could still technically be in attendance on the queen while being out of her sight and hearing, giving Victoria some rare privacy.
The tour includes the family's private apartments, where their personalities are revealed even more. Albert's room carries on the German tradition of the kunstkammer, the cabinet of curiousities in which items from the natural world, antiquities, religious memorabilia and small works of art mixed to show off the owner's "Renaissance Man" credentials. Victoria's private space is both more feminine and more religious, but that also no doubt reflects the fact that she lived to into her 80s, whilst Albert's rooms were frozen in time after his death at just 42. Victoria died here, with a painting of Albert on his funeral bier above her. Macabre but touching. The office they shared between their private rooms is particularly revealing, packed with all the bits and pieces they loved the most. Nothing banishes the idea of Victoria as a prude faster than the enormous and titillating painting of a group of lovely ladies in various stages of undress at their bath that hangs directly across from the desks. It was a birthday present from Victoria to Albert.
All of these rooms, and the nurseries above, overlook a rolling green landscape that gently falls towards Osborne Beach and the Solent. The scene reminded Albert of the Bay of Naples. That seems a bit of a stretch, particularly as the modern view is dominated by the cluster of Portsmouth's towers across the water, but on a sunny day it's still glorious to see scores of sails skidding across the Solent's almost-Mediterranean blue.
Victoria continued to use Osborne regularly in the four decades after Albert's death, with just one major change. As India's importance grew and she was named its empress, Victoria became increasingly entranced with the sub-continent. She added an Indian-inspired wing to reflect her fascination, dominated by the astonishing Durbar room. This enormous space drips with ornate plasterwork and outrageous decorative detail. It's the architectural equivalent of Chicken Tikka Masala; something that's supposed to be Indian but is actually terribly English. The hallways leading to it are full of beautiful portraits of Victoria's Indian subjects, from jewel-bedecked maharajas to humble labourers. They're almost as fascinating as the remarkable room beyond.
Osborne is surrounded by an enormous estate full of gardens, woodlands, views and walking paths, almost all accessible with dogs. (They’re not, of course, allowed in the house, but there are a decent number of shady parking spots so you can leave them in a well-ventilated car.) You can easily spend a full day here and many people come with picnics to enjoy the remarkable views. The seriously horticulturally-minded, however, should head to the other side of the island to get their garden fix.The Ventnor Botanical Garden is nestled in the southern edge of the Undercliff, a geological feature of the Isle of Wight that creates a micro-climate that is, on average, drier and 5 degrees (C) warmer than the surrounding area. The result: semi-tropical gardening conditions typical of the Mediterranean. The courtyards, paths and long borders at the heart of this garden remind me more of the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild on the Côte d'Azur than anything I've seen in England. And I'm guessing that my visit in late May put me there at the garden's peak, with roses, iris and many other flowers in glorious bloom and towering spikes of blue Echium (aka bugloss) making bold architectural statements.
Ventor really gets unique, however, when its inspiration leaves this continent. A South African garden spills down sunny terraces to show off the treasure trove we get from that country. It's a crazy, glorious patchwork of colour. These are plants mostly grown in the UK as annuals but I suspect that here, as in South Africa, they're perennials.
Someone has clearly put a lot of money into this garden recently. You enter through a beautiful, modern facility cut into the hillside with shops, educational spaces and restaurants. The garden advertises two places to eat … a cafe on the top level, with an enormous deck overlooking the gardens below, and a "proper" restaurant called Edulis on the formal patio with pond two stories below … and it was obvious on my visit that tourists were coming just for the dining opportunities.
If only their staffing was equal to their facilities. I visited on a Saturday, at the end of a week of school holidays. Presumably peak time. Yet only the cafe was open, and there appeared to be just three people staffing the whole garden. They'd all shifted onto cafe duty, leaving nobody to sell tickets, plants or a range of lovely housewares in the shop. Even with all those hands to the kitchen pumps, a sizeable crowd was waiting more than 20 minutes to buy coffee or a sandwich. There's enormous potential here for an upscale tourist destination on top of a great garden, but management will need to improve to make it so.
The Ventnor Botanical Garden isn't affiliated with any other institution, so neither English Heritage, Royal Horticultural Society or National Trust cards will help you here. Admission, if you can find someone to pay, is £9.50. I wish I’d realised in advance that they allow dogs on leads, buying your ticket online reduces the price by a pound and the ticket allows a return visit within a week. All of which would have encouraged me to discover this garden near the beginning of our trip, had I only known. I leave you, dear reader, to take advantage of my discovery.
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