It’s little surprise the fashion photographer Norman Parkinson’s favourite building was the outré, flamboyant Brighton Pavilion, pictured on the cover of the Observer Magazine of 16 April 1989, which teases us with his worst building, too (‘The beautiful and the damned’).
While Parkinson hymned the royal palace – ‘wonderful, a delight, giving an insight into the age of George IV and putting Brighton in its right context as a holiday resort’ – he decried a royal outbuilding, calling Basil Spence’s Household Cavalry in Hyde Park ‘that monstrous concrete mass… I hate it with a passion’. A description worse in its way than Prince Charles’s ‘monstrous carbuncle’.
