Buckingham Palace: The Official Illustrated History [Paperback]

An interesting telling of the history of Buckingham Palace, the book follows its slow and often rocky metamorphosis from a small villa to a State building. The text's fascination lies in its little details during various rebuilds, listing changes, interventions and alterations made and remade by a line of single-minded monarchs and penniless governments, put upon a series of browbeaten architects. It deals with the fabric of the building as well as the politics and the characters which drove it forwards.

My disappointment came from the illustrations - and they were real disappointments. This being the Official *Illustrated* History, I felt my expectations of many and lavish photographs of the interior rooms of the palace were not unreasonable. There are, in fact, ten photographs of interior rooms. To be fair, there are more pre-photography illustrations and watercolours, but what I would have hoped for--and where it particularly missed out, I think--was images providing clearer comparisons of individual rooms throughout history. This would have been useful if for no other reason than that even the best drawn image distorts perspective and scale, so a photograph of the same room would aid perception.

As it is, far too much page space was wasted on reproductions of the paintings on display in the palace. Whilst those which depicted its former residents were valid and useful additions, the rest were superfluous to the actual subject of the palace itself. One or two of the most relevant would have been interesting, particularly if seen in situ, to give a sense of scale and intention, but it felt like very much like the easy way out, to plaster the pages with images of art which one can find anywhere and will have seen a hundred times already. In all, there are a huge thirty-six illustrations of paintings--including the seventeen more relevant ones of occupants--most of which have no real significance in the history of the palace. They are simply there.

The same can be said of the furniture, which once again would have been interesting, had groupings of relevant and purpose-made pieces been shown in-situ, with perhaps a few detailed photographs of individual pieces. But aside from those same ten room views, they generally depict, again, a mishmash of generalised objets d'art which are scattered about the palace, often with the image cut out (ie, without a background), so that one sees only the object itself and so doesn't even gain a sense of its place in greater decorative schemes. A few have a history behind them, and I was glad to have images of these, but at twenty-eight images, they comprise by far the majority of picture subjects in the book, and based on the cover image, I had hoped for more relevant and informative research material.

References made to changes to the design and structure of the building would also have benefitted greatly from further `before and after' illustrations of the same facade, for comparison. A great deal is made of types of fenestration and choices of stone facing, and illustrations of these (even if of the same stone on other contemporary buildings) would have been far more relevant than yet another photograph of a mantle clock.

In all, it felt like a book in which the majority of illustrations were chosen at random from pre-existing stock, rather than time being spent putting together relevant images. This would not have bothered me so much had the text been as light and generalised as the images, but the text was very much that of a more serious reference book, whilst the images were generalised tourist guide-book fare. I had looked forward to purchasing the run of books available in the series, providing images of different palace interiors which would give a sense of the scale and grandeur of buildings of this significance, but having bought this one, I'll look elsewhere. Whilst the text was interesting, I'm afraid that for an illustrated history, it was let down entirely by its illustrations.