The view looking through the plant-filled first floor balcony of a typical terraced house shows the Garden Pavilion designed by Edward Blore in 1843. It is visible over the high wall of the Palace garden because it was built on a slight eminence created by the excavation of the garden lake.

The Garden Pavilion housed an important series of fresco paintings by Maclise, Landseer, Eastlake and Dyce, commissioned by Prince Albert to experiment with the medium and subject matter in anticipation of the enormously ambitious scheme of decoration for the Houses of Parliament in the newly built Palace of Westiminster. The old Palace was devastated by fire in 1834, and by 1846 the new building was sufficiently advanced for the mural decorations to be planned. The little garden building no longer exists; by the 1920s it had so completely deteriorated that Queen Mary was forced to order its demolition.

What can be seen of the room from which the view was taken suggests that it was furnished with care and no little expense. The tables flanking the window are a pair and bear fashionable ornaments including a porcelain bowl and cup. The heavily draped curtains are finished with a fringed pelmet.

Swarbreck's earliest recorded work is a volume of lithographic views of Switzerland, rather in the manner of Samuel Prout. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1852, and subjects are interiors of Elizabethan rooms