Named for ‘Prinny’, the future George IV – the extravagant, pleasure-loving prince who gave his name to the glittering Regency
The Prince Regent in Brixton holds seven hundred and ninety reviews and a 4.2 – a solid score on a good sample – and it is named after one of the most extravagant, pleasure-loving and colourful figures in all of British royal history: “Prinny,” the Prince Regent, the future George IV, who gave his name to the glittering, elegant, dissolute age of the Regency.
The Prince Regent
The Prince Regent was George, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of King George III – who, when his father was incapacitated by mental illness, ruled as Prince Regent from 1811 to 1820, before succeeding as King George IV. “The Regency” – the period of his rule as Regent, and by extension the wider era of his influence – is one of the most distinctive and evocative periods in British history, an age of elegance, style, extravagance, art and scandal, which bears his stamp entirely. Few figures have so completely coloured their age.
The Prince Regent – “Prinny,” as he was mockingly known – was a figure of enormous extravagance and appetite. He was a great patron of the arts and architecture, a man of genuine taste and culture, who commissioned magnificent buildings and collected great art. But he was also famously dissolute – a gambler, a glutton, a womaniser, hugely fat, colossally extravagant, and buried in debt. He was, in short, a magnificent and scandalous figure, at once cultured and dissipated, elegant and gross – the very embodiment of the glittering, indulgent Regency age.
The glittering Regency
The Regency was a glittering age – one of elegance, style and refinement, but also of extravagance, scandal and excess. It was the age of Jane Austen and Lord Byron, of Beau Brummell and the dandies, of elegant architecture and beautiful design (the “Regency style” in architecture and furniture remains admired to this day), of glittering society and outrageous scandal. It was an age of style and sophistication on the surface, and of gambling, debt, drink and dissolution beneath – the elegant, indulgent, scandalous world over which the extravagant Prince Regent presided.
The Prince Regent’s greatest monument is the Royal Pavilion at Brighton – the astonishing, fantastical, oriental palace he built as his pleasure-dome by the sea, with its Indian domes and Chinese interiors, a riot of exotic extravagance and fantasy. It is the perfect expression of the man and his age – extravagant, fantastical, cultured and indulgent, a pleasure-palace of pure delight and excess. He also gave his name to Regent Street and Regent’s Park in London, grand and elegant creations of his age. The Prince Regent shaped the look and style of a whole era.
The prince of pleasure
There is something fitting in a pub being named after the Prince Regent, for he was, above all, a prince of pleasure – a man devoted to the enjoyment of life’s indulgences, to food and drink and art and beauty and extravagant delight. A pub, that home of pleasant indulgence and good cheer, is a fitting monument to “Prinny,” the great connoisseur of pleasure. His extravagance ruined his finances and his health, but it also gave us the glittering Regency, the Brighton Pavilion, and Regent Street – a legacy of style, beauty and pleasure. The Prince Regent flies a name of genuine colour, extravagance and historical richness.
The pub
A solid, popular pub doing a fair 4.2 across a good sample, named after the Prince Regent – “Prinny,” the future George IV, the extravagant, pleasure-loving prince who gave his name to the glittering Regency age.
Verdict
Solid, popular, and colourfully named after the Prince Regent – the extravagant, dissolute, cultured prince of pleasure who named the glittering Regency age and built the Brighton Pavilion.
Have a pint at the Prince Regent, and raise it to “Prinny” – the great prince of pleasure, extravagant and scandalous and cultured, who gave his name to the most glittering age in British style.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The thing about people complaining it is too negative is they’re essentially asking satire to be less truthful.