The Royal Pavilion — a palace commissioned by Prince George in the late 1700s — is the icon of Brighton & Hove. It draws hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world and is front-and-centre in the Council logo. The city itself may be the U.K.’s most forward-thinking and liberal: the Brighton Pavilion constituency has the U.K.’s only Green Party M.P., and the city is often considered the ‘Queer Capital’ of the U.K.

Without this building, Brighton may well have ended up just like its neighbouring former fishing towns — Hastings, Eastbourne, Newhaven, Bexhill, Worthing — conservative, sleepy. Instead, the city of today is vibrant, queer, liberal — an oddity. The Prince (Later King) George’s investment in the then village through his Pavilion set the stage for this transformation.

But the Pavilion is also an icon of the colonialist ideology of the time — an ideology which the present management of the building doesn't acknowledge. In this episode, we discuss what the Royal Pavilion means for modern-day Brighton.