Buckingham Palace was the height of royal power – so why did Queen Victoria and Albert hate it?

For most young married couples, moving into a new house represents an exciting new start. But for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, their newlywed bliss was marred by their cold, smelly, disorganised new home: Buckingham Palace.

Today Buckingham Palace is synonymous with the British monarchy, but this was not always the case.

“It’s only in the 20th century [that we get] Buckingham Palace as we know it today,” says Kate Williams, speaking on an episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series: Royal Residences: Secrets and Scandals.

Victoria and Albert were the first monarchs to use it as their primary residence, and it took substantial work to turn it into a home fit for a queen.

Before Victoria, Buckingham Palace wasn’t an official royal residence

Buckingham House first passed into the royal family’s ownership in 1761. It was originally intended only to be a retreat for Queen Victoria’s grandmother, Queen Charlotte, who loved the house and raised 14 of her 15 children there, including Victoria’s father. It officially became known as a palace from the 1790s, but St James’ Palace continued to be the main royal residence.

The royal family steadily began to spend more and more time at Buckingham Palace, though it would never become the official residence of George IV and William IV – Victoria’s uncles – either.

In fact, William IV thought of it as “something of a white elephant” that he was “stuck with”, Williams says. He tried to pass it on by offering it as a new Parliament building when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, but MPs rejected it as too dingy.

Nevertheless, work was slowly being done on the palace to expand and renovate it. The main phase of this work was finally finished in May 1837. By this time, St James’s Palace had become increasingly less desirable. The area around the main residence had been built up, so there was less privacy available for royals living there, and its Tudor architecture and fire damage meant it was no longer a comfortable place to live.

So, after her coronation in 1837, Queen Victoria moved into the refreshed Buckingham Palace as her primary residence.

The Palace wasn’t fit for purpose at first

However, Buckingham Palace wasn’t thought of as a “suitable” residence for monarchs even once one was living there, Williams says.

The palace was a labyrinth at this time, with lots of dark rooms and corridors with unclear uses. This meant that security was lax, and it proved easy for determined intruders to gain entry to the palace.

“It wasn't really surprising that one of Victoria's fans and stalkers known as ‘the boy Jones’ managed to live in the palace for ages, eating a few crumbs of bread and drinking wine, until he was found under the queen's chair by the queen's maternity nurse,” Williams says.

In addition to its lacklustre security, it was infamously cold, especially in the winter, because the chimneys smoked so much that the fires couldn’t be properly lit.

• Read more | Queen Victoria's unhappy childhood: life under the 'Kensington System'

The sewer system wasn’t fit for purpose, either, and the palace was badly ventilated and smelly. Commissioners who inspected the palace soon after Victoria moved in found that the rooms weren’t cleaned or dusted often, and that the windows were kept closed, allowing unpleasant smells from decaying food and garden waste to spread.

The house was also generally mismanaged, with staff badly organised and a general lack of discipline. For example, in great houses the housework was usually finished by 10am, but the domestic workers in Buckingham Palace didn’t finish their tasks until the early afternoon.

“One team washed the outside of the windows, and another team washed the inside of the windows, so the windows were never perfectly clean,” Williams says, in one example of the inadequate standards.

Prince Albert's renovations

Clearly, there was a lot to be done to make Buckingham Palace fit for a queen, but Prince Albert was willing to take on the job when he arrived in England.

“Albert, with his customary German efficiency, set about looking at the workings of the palace and he was very disappointed. It was a total disaster, so he looked into making the palaces much more efficient,” Williams says.

Previously, different parts of household tasks were under the jurisdiction of different people, so that, for example, different people were in charge of the laying of a fire and the lighting of it, and six different people had to sign off on simple repairs like fixing a broken window.

Prince Albert changed this. He gathered most of the responsibility for the upkeep of the palace into one role: the Master of the Household, who was to permanently live in the Palace.

Steadily, with its flaws identified, the state of the building was wrested into better condition. But the royal couple still weren’t satisfied just yet.

The royal couple continued to improve the Palace

Victoria and Albert also moved Marble Arch from its original position just outside Buckingham Palace to where it sits today, in Hyde Park. There are rumours that they did this because the Arch wasn’t wide enough for Victoria’s state coach to pass through. But that’s proven to be untrue.

Instead, it was moved to make room for Buckingham Palace to expand, because by 1847, it was seen as too small to comfortably house her courtiers and ever-expanding family.

• Read more | Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: what was their relationship like?

This expansion was done by Edward Blore, an architect who had previously worked on Westminster Abbey and Lambeth Palace. He built the East Wing, which incorporates the front façade and the famous central balcony still used on important royal occasions. This balcony was Prince Albert’s suggestion, and has played an important role in allowing members of the royal family to be increasingly visible to their subjects ever since.

Even once the East Wing was built, the palace wasn’t perfect. Victoria complained of a lack of a space relative to any of her present apartments, so work on a new ballroom began. That was completed in May 1856, nearly a century after Buckingham Palace first came under royal ownership.

The history of Buckingham Palace serves as a reminder not to be too jealous of people with bigger houses than you: the bigger the house, the bigger the potential problems that come with it.

Kate Williams was speaking on her HistoryExtra Academy series, Royal residences: secrets and scandals. All episodes are available now ad-free on the HistoryExtra app. Start watching today.