On the Royal Route: Time works wonders for Brighton Pavilion, less so for Kensington Palace

When I first started working in Europe in the mid-'90s, I was an obsessive weekend tourist. Without local friends (they'd come later) or household responsibilities (I spent my first three years in serviced, corporate-funded rentals), I could use every weekend to indulge my passions for British history, culture and countryside.

Times have changed. And though I'm still an aggressive sightseer on holidays (as this blog attests), I've gone ever more native in the UK. My limited time gets claimed by visiting exhibitions in London rather than places I've already seen. Activities revolve around catching up with friends. A good chunk of every weekend is demanded by house and garden. Until a friend with the typical American's energy for power sightseeing comes to town, and my old touring instincts revive.

My university buddy Lee isn't just any American. He's a passionate Anglophile with a deep interest in, and knowledge of, British royal history. He was already familiar with the obvious places. We needed to dig deeper. With his particular interest in the Victorian era, I would have loved to get him to Osborne House, but we didn't have enough time for the Isle of Wight. Kensington Palace and the Royal Pavilion at Brighton got the nod.

I'd been to both, of course, but neither for at least a dozen years. In memory, both were delights, and before last weekend's touring I would have told you that Kensington was my favourite royal residence in London. No longer. Perhaps my increased familiarity with England's cultural heritage over the years has put it into a context I didn't have when it first impressed me. This time, I found its sights mostly underwhelming and its cost extraordinary. At £23.50 on the door (it's £4 less online), it's roughly the same price as Hampton Court, Buckingham Palace or the Tower, but with much less to see. Meanwhile, the years have seen the town of Brighton pour restoration funds into their community-owned Pavilion, making it even more magnificent than on my last visit. And at just £13.50 per person, a bargain. Here's a bit more on both.

KENSINGTON PALACE

I suspect just two words explain why this place can charge such a premium despite being the least impressive of the royal palaces: Princess Diana. She's strongly connected to the site, her sons still live here and the "temporary" exhibition space is occupied by a display of her dresses. No doubt they'll be here until that whole generation of women of a certain age, currently gazing at them with misty-eyed adoration, passes away. Until then, the relics of the saint of High Street Ken will keep pulling them in.

I, however, will tell you that the highlight of visiting here is the state rooms, and the woman who deserves the spotlight is Queen Caroline (nee of Ansbach), a highly-educated and hugely-competent consort of great refinement who probably would have been better at ruling the country than her husband, George II. Her tastes greatly influenced Kensington, Hampton Court and the Royal Collection, something that's explored here in a gallery devoted to her.

The interiors at Kensington are very similar to Hampton Court, so if if the bigger palace is in your sightseeing plans then you may want to give this one a pass. If, however, you don't have time to get that far from central London, Kensington gives you the same William and Mary and early-Georgian style: grand staircases with frescoes of life-sized courtiers watching your progress, dark wooden panelling, Grinling Gibbons carvings, floor-to-ceiling sash windows, damask-covered walls hung densely with old masters and a hefty slice of Queen Caroline's oriental porcelain collection. George I's cupola room is the star sight, with a tromp l'oeil ceiling painted by William Kent to create a Pantheon-like dome of blue and gold coffers rising to an impressive Star of the Order of the Garter. Handel performed new works here for his patron; it is a magical setting worthy of genius. The curators of the Royal Collection have also made sure that some of the masterpieces have been diverted to Kensington, most notably Van Dyck's iconic Charles I on horseback and his Cupid and Psyche, some fine Veroneses and Tintorettos, Holbein sketches and most of the famous portraits of Queen Victoria.

Victoria looms large because she was born, lived until her accession and held her first council meeting here. There's a suite of rooms dedicated to her story which were renovated extensively in 2012. (Along with the rest of the palace, though this is the bit that seemed most different to me.) They've tried to go modern, with multi-media experiences, bold quotes and infographics screened onto the walls, interactive dress-up areas and touchable displays. It's good, but sparse. There's a lot of empty floor space here, and there's a surprising dearth of furniture or treasures in the display cases considering the motherlode of stuff the long-lived queen left behind. The main reason to plough through these rooms is to get to the jewellery exhibit at the end, opened just four months ago. There are three tiaras, all breathtaking. Most significant is the emerald and diamond, accompanied by matching necklace, earrings and brooch, all designed by Prince Albert. If Vicky hadn't realised he was "a keeper" before, I'm sure this set locked the deal.

Even if you're not a Diana worshipper, the costume exhibition is interesting. They've made a real effort to get some of the most memorable items here: the tweed set she wore in the highlands for one of her first photo shoots, the casual outfit she donned on her land mine mission, the Northwestern purple gown she wore to a university-sponsored fund raiser in Chicago (everyone remembers that one, right?). There are photos of her wearing each item, and explanations of how each was designed for the specific event it debuted at. This suite of rooms is also a rare example of a fully air-conditioned space at a London tourist attraction which, this summer, might actually have been worth the admission price.

THE ROYAL PAVILION, BRIGHTON

The Pavilion may be the seaside town of Brighton's No. 1 tourist attraction, but I'd categorise it as one of the greatest ... and certainly most unique ... buildings in all of Europe. This was George IV's seaside retreat, far enough from London's prying eyes for the notorious libertine, spendthrift and gourmande to indulge his every whim. It's gorgeous, crazy, seductive and totally bizarre; like Coleridge's opium-fuelled poem, "in Xanadu did Kubla Kahn...", brought to life through architecture and interior design. You expect to run into Lord Byron cavorting around every corner. The exterior is Indian, the interior Chinese, the execution pure English. It's a Western, Romantic-era imagining of the exotic East that's as true to its source material as the Beauty and the Beast sets are to real French chateaux. And it's all the better for it.

There are dragons everywhere. A beast in full flight holds the dining room chandelier in his claws. In the music room they hold up the curtains and wind sinuously at corners to create oversized tie-backs. Surprisingly lifelike, 1/3rd-size figures of Chinese archetypes watch you in the main gallery; they're bobble heads whose mechanisms make them nod when people pass close by. Hand-painted wall papers and panels show an imagined world of Oriental fairy tale, full of gorgeous women and handsome men in sumptuous gowns. The furniture ... all classic English Regency at its core ... is lavishly accented by palm trees, bamboo, dragons and other elements of the Orient. Although George and his decorators, the august firm of Crace, weren't purists. Egyptian sphinxes and slaves creep in here, a few Greek gods there.

Even the kitchen is a joy. George enticed the world's most famous chef, Antonin Carême, to come work for him by promising him pretty much anything he wanted, including specifying the set up of his kitchen. Not only is the space beautiful .... elegant palm trees hold up a glass-filled cupola while serried ranks of copper pots reflect the sunlight pouring in from above ... but it was state of the art. That cupola and the high ceilings below it keep air circulated and cool the kitchen down. What's possibly the world's first extractor hoods arch over the stoves. Automated turning spits could roast four or five rows of animals at a time. And, unlike almost every aristocratic pile ever built in this country, the kitchen is right next to the dining room, meaning the food at George's famous parties would have been hot and fresh as Carême intended.

The Pavilion is in magnificent condition thanks to Brighton's consistent investment. Victoria sold the place to the town ... it was too outrageous, too small and too much in the public eye for her tastes ... after which it went through a variety of incarnations and crises. Aware that this is the anchor pulling international tourism to their town, Brighton lavishes time and money into regular improvements. Fixtures and fittings are in top condition, while pieces of furniture and decorative elements that were once dispersed are regularly found and returned. Since my last visit the vast swathes of curtains have been renewed to sumptuous effect, they've restored the gardens, opened a suite of rooms once used by Victoria and Albert and created a cafe on the roof, complete with a balcony where you can sit in the open air, take tea under the domes and look out at the gardens.

Staff here were noticeably more cheerful and spontaneously offered more information than the people at Kensington. Maybe it's the civic ownership. You definitely feel their pride in their palace. One of the guides told me about opera nights in the winter, where you actually get to eat in George's magnificent dining room and adjourn to the equally dramatic music room for a recital. That's enough to tempt me to a return visit, even without the excuse of a visiting American.

Maritime Museum does welcome resurrection of remarkable woman's reputation

There are few eras of British history before our modern one that have as many fascinating women as the late 18th and early 19th century.

Of course there's my heroine, Jane Austen, but she's just one of a flock of impressive writers including Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney. Mary Wollstonecraft struck some remarkable blows for early feminism, while her daughter Mary Shelley shook up the world with Frankenstein. Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vigee le Brun were remarkable painters, while silversmith Hester Bateman created some of the forms we think of as classically Georgian. Sarah Siddons was establishing what we now know as modern stage acting, while Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace was making contributions to higher mathematics that would lead to modern computing. Georgiana Spencer was a notable, and fascinating, figure on the national political stage. I could go on.

Inevitably, most of these women have taken a shadowy place behind the men of the era. Of few is this more true than Emma Hamilton, now known by most ... if she is known at all ... as the mistress of Lord Nelson. But Emma was so much more than that. A fascinating show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is currently trying to set the record straight.

A woman with a remarkable aptitude for learning, she was an actress, model, singer, classicist, diplomat and arbiter of fashion. She used her skills to triumph through a series of circumstances that would have destroyed most women. She left home and was making her own way as a servant from the age of 12. She probably had to survive a stint as a prostitute (the usual end for young girls seeking their fortune in London, with up to 50,000 women working in the city's sex trade at the time) before she managed to ascend to the ranks of kept mistress to a nobleman. He dropped her when she became pregnant. She found another "protector" from amongst his friends. It might have been a similar story to many other girls used and tossed away, had it not been for Emma's thirst for knowledge. With every step she drank in lessons, from etiquette and accent to literature and current events. This is, undoubtably, one of the things that made her so fascinating to the portraitist George Romney, who painted her more than 70 times.

One of the triumphs of the show is a whole room of these Romney portraits. Romney said one of the reasons he kept returning to her as a model was her ability to inhabit a part, while society ladies all shared the same placid, expressionless gaze. Here you see her as a demure matron, a joyous young girl, a penitent Magdalen, a sensuous bacchanate; clearly all the same woman, but inhabiting radically different roles. It's easy to imagine what an astonishing actress, and how charismatic, she must have been.

Another horrific tragedy befell her when her second patron, Charles Greville, wanted to get rid of her in order to marry an heiress. Rather than settling an amount of money on her (the usual way of breaking up such relationships at the time), he shipped her to his uncle in Naples, telling her it was a vacation that he'd soon join her on, while informing his uncle that he was sending him a new mistress for his enjoyment. The show does a fine job using contemporary documents to dig into the tension of this situation. The handbook Charles gave her on being a good wife, annotated and clearly studied by Emma in an attempt to be all he had wanted ... despite the lack of legal status ... exposes the depths of his villainy. Her letters back to him, showing a slow realisation that he'd ended the relationship without the courage to do it face-to-face, are heartbreaking. There's no question she adored him.

Emma combined luck and fortitude to transform crisis into survival. Greville's uncle was the British ambassador to Naples, who was also a well known antiquarian and a "must see" stop on the grand tour. He was fascinated as much by Emma's mind as by her beauty, and set out to transform her, My Fair Lady style. In this part of the exhibit, paintings, books and artefacts bring the remarkable world of turn-of-the-19th-century Naples to life. Pompeii was giving up its treasures, there was a glittering royal court, every artist and intellectual came through town and Vesuvius smouldered over it all.

The place, and Hamilton's tutelage, inspired Emma to create The Attitudes ... a highly intellectual mime show in which she would transform, with the aid of just a few props and a shawl, into a series of historical and literary women from the ancient world. Visitors loved the challenge of figuring out who was who, showing off their impressive classical educations as they did so. I'd read much about The Attitudes, but the exhibit's decision to bring them to life by creating a small theatre and presenting a film of an Emma look-alike performing some of them was a master stroke. When she wasn't performing, she was studying classical pottery or hiking up Vesuvius for early lessons in vulcanology with Hamilton, or working with a singing coach. Her voice was good enough that the Madrid opera tried to hire her, and Haydn wrote a cantata within his Nelson mass for her to sing. At this point, the naval hero was no more than a respected friend.

Hamilton then shocked society by marrying her. But Emma was so famous by this point ... evidenced by a set of fine china on display with her Attitudes as the painted decoration ... she could ride out the negative comments. Here starts the summit of Emma's career. Now Lady Hamilton, artist and aristocrat, she became close friends with Queen Maria Carolina of the Two Sicilies. As the daughter of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa and the sister of the recently executed Marie Antoinette, Maria Carolina had learned a lot of first-hand lessons about government. Some good, some bad. She needed them, since her husband Ferdinand was ... to put it kindly ... developmentally challenged. Maria Carolina was functionally ruling the kingdom, giving Emma enormous influence. As the Napoleonic wars heated up, Emma was playing a critical diplomatic role, even taking the lead in organising the court's evacuation to Sicily in the face of a threatened revolution.

This is where things get weird, and where we enter the story Emma is best known for. The Hamiltons provided political support for Nelson and nursed him back to health after the Battle of the Nile. They were good friends. At some point, Emma and Nelson became lovers. The ageing Hamilton didn't seem to mind. Demonstrating that the trend for the press turning against favourites is an old one, a series of political cartoons illustrate how the London papers made Emma the villain. Though their love was ardent and sincere, society never accepted the fallen Lady Hamilton's relationship with their naval hero.

The final rooms show the life they tried to make together, despite public disapproval and Nelson's wife. (Lord Hamilton died two years before Nelson, eliminating half of their barrier, but Lady Nelson refused divorce.) Nelson's letters displayed here are filled with passionate love and firm instructions to pour all of the proceeds of his successful career into furnishing the house they shared together. You can see drawings of the place and some of the furniture, along with a painting of their daughter Horatia. It's most striking for the fact that the painter chooses a pose similar to one that made the young Emma famous. He tries to conjure the old magic, but the daughter was a sadly plain girl with a wistful expression ... as if to embody the tragedy in store for both her parents.

Particularly poignant is the display of Nelson's will, scribbled hastily the night before the famous battle that killed him, begging the government to take care of Emma. The government ignored him. Emma could have lived quietly on the pension she received from Lord Hamilton's estate, but she was too used to the high life. The final room of the exhibit exposes the full tragedy of her fall, as she has to sell off the house she shared with Nelson, ends up in debtor's prison, moves to Calais to escape her creditors and dies of liver failure brought on by attempting to drink away her despair. The parting sight is Nelson's dress uniform. Empty. Ghostly. A haunting image of the love that sent a remarkable woman's life on a trajectory to doom.

Well done to the National Maritime Museum for trying to redress history's crimes of omission. Emma Hamilton deserves to be so much more than the a sexual footnote of famous man's story. She has an amazing life all her own, and this exhibit does a fine job telling us about it. The show's on until 17 April, more info here.