There it is. Buckingham Palace. Seven hundred and seventy-five rooms, the balcony where the royal family waves, the front door on ten thousand postcards. And for most of its life, nobody actually wanted to live here.
It started as a regular house — a private mansion built for a duke, on a spot where King James had once tried and failed to farm silkworms. The royal family bought it as a comfortable home to raise the kids in. Then King George the Fourth decided to turn the house into a palace, and hired an architect named John Nash to do it. Nash was given a budget of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. He spent over six hundred thousand. Four times the budget. The newspapers called it a monstrous and profligate waste, and Nash was fired before he finished. He'd built a grand triumphal arch as the palace's front gate, and it was such an embarrassment that they eventually unbolted the whole arch and dragged it a mile away to the corner of Hyde Park, where it still stands today — a giant
marble gateway to absolutely nothing. It's called Marble Arch. It's a fired man's mistake, sitting in traffic.
The first monarch to actually move into the finished palace was Queen Victoria, and the place was a disaster. The chimneys barely worked, so the rooms filled with smoke. The whole thing was cold and half-built. But it's Victoria who started the tradition everyone comes here for — the ba
