King’s House stands on the seafront in Hove, a grand Grade II listed building constructed between 1871 and 1874 to house the city’s wealthy residents. Over the decades it has shifted through many identities — from opulent mansion blocks to The Prince’s Hotel, a Royal Navy outpost during the Second World War, the headquarters of the South Eastern Electricity Board, and later Brighton and Hove City Council. Each transformation has left behind traces of its inhabitants, subtle imprints of work, routine, and life embedded in the architecture itself.
Now converted into luxury apartments, the building has entered yet another phase of renewal. But before its redevelopment, I explored its deserted corridors and meeting rooms — spaces once filled with daily motion and purpose, now standing in stillness. I was drawn to what remained: the furniture left behind, the scattered papers, the way light moved through empty rooms.
In these photographs, we notice the absence of people. Chairs sit as though a meeting has only just ended; doors hang open, inviting yet directionless; sunlight cuts across the floor, revealing dust, texture and the quiet endurance of the everyday. Each image becomes a meditation on memory, on what lingers after occupation and how buildings hold the residue of human presence long after it has gone.
King’s House, in this state of transition, seemed suspended between endings and beginnings. Its silence carried echoes of all the lives and labours that once animated it. Through photographing the space, I wanted to honour that in-between moment and the fragile pause before history is rewritten, when a place, emptied of purpose, still hums softly with everything it has been.
