Oscar Wilde’s hotel room discovered at Brighton’s Royal Albion

The room was part of a suite overlooking the sea on the first floor of Brighton’s Royal Albion Hotel, where Wilde stayed a night with his companion Alphonse Conway in 1894. Researchers were able to match the historical layout of the suite to a description given by Wilde during his infamous trial in 1895.

The Grade II* listed Royal Albion Hotel was built in 1826 and had many famous visitors, as well as being painted by Turner and Constable.

Dr Michael Shapland of UCL Archaeology South-East was brought in as a heritage advisor by Britannia Hotels as part of plans to transform the historic seafront hotel following fire damage incurred in July 2023. He made the identification following a careful analysis of the building and surviving construction plans, as well as Wilde’s testimony from the trial.

Dr Shapland said: “Old buildings have long memories, and I find it quite moving to realise this is where Oscar and Alphonse stayed 130 years ago. It was an important time in Wilde’s life and marks a point just before things fell apart for him.”

Wilde’s brief visit to Brighton

In 1894 Oscar Wilde was at the height of his fame as a writer and poet. That summer he was working on one of his best-known plays The Importance of Being Earnest – which would be his last – whilst on holiday with his family in nearby Worthing. There he developed a friendship with a newspaper seller named Alphonse Conway, and that September the pair took a boat to Brighton and spent a night together at the Royal Albion Hotel.

This liaison became part of Oscar Wilde’s downfall. The following spring he was arrested on charges of gross indecency related to homosexuality. Conway was tracked down by the prosecution along with other young men Wilde had associated with. He was questioned by a private detective, and his resulting witness statement was read out in court as part of the evidence against Wilde.

On 25th May Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ hard labour, much of it at Reading Gaol. His health never recovered, and he would spend the last three years of his life in exile abroad, before dying in poverty in Paris age 46. The fate of Alphonse Conway is unclear; it is thought he changed his name following the trial, making his story difficult to follow.

Rediscovering Wilde’s bedroom

Wilde’s connection with the Royal Albion is well-known locally, but not where in the hotel he and Alphonse Conway stayed. Famous old buildings like this may only get stripped back for study and restoration once every hundred years, so Dr Shapland saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do some detective work.

In his trial at the Old Bailey criminal court, Wilde testified that he and Conway took a suite of rooms on the first floor of the Brighton hotel: two bedrooms and a sitting room, likely connected by green fabric-covered doors.

The ongoing restoration made it possible to work out which parts of the building are original, and crucially which doorways were only inserted after the hotel was refurbished in the 20th century. Using old floorplans from the East Sussex Record Office, Dr Shapland worked out that at the time of Wilde’s visit there was only one place on the first floor where two bedrooms were connected by a shared sitting room. This was at the south end of the western range, where guests had a balcony looking out over the sea.

The Hotel Today

These rooms had been destroyed in a previous fire at the hotel in 1998 and much of the wing was rebuilt using modern methods. But when this area was cleared following the fire in 2023, it was revealed that part of the original building dating to Wilde’s time had survived.

Dr Shapland said: “To my delight we discovered a wall from Oscar and Alphonse’s bedroom suite had been spared, and we even found the original blocked fireplace.”

Plans for the hotel’s restoration are underway, including an extensive refurbishment of the hotel’s eastern wing and a brand new building on the western part of the site.

Paul Streets, Director of Britannia Hotels Group, commented: “The Royal Albion Hotel holds an extraordinary place in Brighton’s history, and discoveries such as this highlight the cultural and human stories embedded within the building. As our restoration plans progress, we are committed to preserving the hotel’s heritage while creating a sensitively designed future for this iconic seafront site. Working alongside respected heritage specialists such as UCL Archaeology South-East has enabled us to uncover and better understand important moments from the hotel’s past, and we look forward to the next chapter of the Royal Albion Hotel.”

Links

• Dr Michael Shapland’s academic profile
• UCL Institute of Archaeology
• UCL Archaeology South-East
• UCL Social & Historical Sciences

Image

• An archaeologist examines the hotel room in Brighton’s Royal Albion hotel that playwrite Oscar Wilde once stayed in.
• Credit: UCL Archaeology South-East

Media Contact

Michael Lucibella

E: m.lucibella [at] ucl.ac.uk