Some Gothic churches were built in these decades, too, as others had been ever since the 1750s. Such an example as Porden’s church at Eccleston of 1809-13, while more recognizably Perpendicular, lacked the brittle charm of the earlier ‘Gothick’ churches of the eighteenth century.
The virtuoso of the Picturesque mode and, after Soane, the greatest architectural figure of these years in England, was John Nash (1752-1835). Working in partnership with Repton for several years at the turn of the century, he turned out a spate of Picturesque houses, many of them rather small, with various sorts of medieval detail: Killy Moon in Ireland, built in 1803, is Norman; more usually they are Tudor or at least Tudoresque: his own East Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight, which was begun in 1798, for example, or Luscombe in Devonshire, begun the following year. The medieval detail was probably designed by the French émigré Augustus (Auguste) Charles Pugin (1762-1832), whom Nash employed at this time (see Chapter [6]). It is rather for their asymmetrical silhouettes and for the free plans that this asymmetry encouraged, however, than for the stylistic plausibility of their detailing that these houses are notable.
Finer than such ‘castles’ is Cronkhill, which Nash built in 1802 at Atcham, Salop. Here the varied forms are all more or less Italianate, and the whole was evidently inspired by the fabricks in the paintings of Claude and the Poussins—literally an example of ‘picturesque’ architecture. Actually more characteristic of the Picturesque at this time, however, is the Hamlet at Blaise Castle. There Nash repeated in 1811 a variety of cottage types that he had already used individually elsewhere, arranging them in an irregular cluster (Plate [50A]).
The Rustic Cottage mode, like so many aspects of the Picturesque in architecture, had its origins in the fabricks designed to ornament eighteenth-century gardens. But the mode had by now attained considerable prestige thanks to the writings of the chief theorists of the Picturesque,[[19]] Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) and Uvedale Price (1747-1829). Their support was responsible also for the rising prestige of the asymmetrical Castellated Mansion and the Italian Villa; indeed, Payne Knight’s own Downton Castle in Shropshire of 1774-8 is both Castellated and Italianate. The appearance of several prettily illustrated books on cottages[[20]] in the nineties provided a variety of models for emulation, and from the beginning of the new century the Cottage mode was well established for gate lodges, dairies, and all sorts of other minor constructions in the country.
For larger buildings a definite Greek Revival was now beginning to take form within the general frame of Romantic Classicism. More young architects were visiting Greece and, for those who could not, two further volumes of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, appearing in 1787 and in 1794, and the parallel Ionian Antiquities, which began to be issued in 1769, provided many more models for imitation than had been available earlier. The Greek Doric order had first been introduced into England by Stuart himself in 1758 in the Hagley Park temple, as has been mentioned earlier; a little later, in 1763, he used the Greek Ionic on Litchfield House which still stands at 15 St James’s Square in London. From the nineties, the Greek orders were in fairly common use, as such a splendid group as the buildings of Chester Castle, of 1793-1820 by Thomas Harrison (1744-1829), handsomely illustrates. However, the handling of them was not as yet very archaeological.
Summerson credits the attack made by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (1770?-1831) in 1804 on Wyatt’s designs for Downing College, Cambridge, with helping to establish a more rigid standard of correctness. However that may be, the winning and partly executed design of 1806-11 for this college by William Wilkins (1778-1839) well illustrates the new ideals. Wilkins had made his own studies of Greek originals in Sicily and Southern Italy, and was publishing them in the Antiquities of Magna Graecia at this very time (1807). The inherited concepts of medieval college architecture, largely maintained through the earlier Georgian period, were all but forgotten at Downing. The group was broken down into free-standing blocks, each as much like a temple as was feasible, and repeated Ionic porticoes provided almost the only architectural features. There was no Soanic originality here, no Picturesque eclecticism; perhaps unfortunately, however, this provided a codified Grecian mode which almost anyone could apply from handbooks of the Greek orders.
Wilkins was also responsible for the first[[21]] British example of a giant columnar monument, the Nelson Pillar of 1808-9 in Dublin. This 134-foot Greek Doric column in Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, of which the construction was supervised by Francis Johnston (1760-1829), initiated a favourite theme of the period usually, and not incorrectly, associated with Napoleon (see Chapter [3]).
The Covent Garden Theatre in London was rebuilt in 1808-9 by Smirke. This pupil of Soane had, like Wilkins, seen ancient Greek buildings with his own eyes and generally aimed to imitate them very closely. His theatre was somewhat less correct than the Cambridge college, but despite the castles he had built it was Smirke rather than Wilkins who carried forward the Grecian mode at its most rigid through four more decades (see Chapter [4]). Wilkins, however, at Grange Park in Hampshire in 1809 had shown, as C.-E. de Beaumont (1757-1811) had done at a country house called ‘Le Temple de Silence’ just before the Revolution in France, how the accommodations of a fair-sized mansion could be squeezed inside the temple form (admittedly with some violence to the latter). Grange Park provided an early paradigm of a Grecian domestic mode destined to be curiously popular at the fringes of the western world in America, in Sweden, and in Russia, but very rarely employed in more sophisticated regions (see Chapter [5]). The house was much modified by later enlargements of 1823-5 by S. P. Cockerell and of 1852 by his son C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863).
Grecian design descended slowly to the world of the builders. The relatively restricted urban house-building of the two decades before Waterloo maintained a close resemblance to that of the 1780s. Russell Square in London, built up by James Burton (1761-1837) in the first decade of the new century, does not differ notably from Bedford Square of twenty years earlier—probably by Thomas Leverton (1743-1824)—except that the façades are smoother and plainer. But a still greater crispness of finish could be, and increasingly was, obtained by covering terrace houses—as for that matter most suburban villas also by this time—with stucco. In this respect the work of some unknown designer in Euston Square in London, which was built up at the same time as Russell Square, may be happily contrasted with Burton’s (which has in any case been much corrupted by the introduction around 1880 of terracotta door and window casings).
In industrial construction, such as the warehouses by William Jessop at the West India Docks, begun in 1799, and those by D. A. Alexander (1768-1846) at the London Docks, begun in 1802, the grandeur and simplicity characteristic of Romantic Classicism can be seen at their best.[[22]] These warehouses also presage the importance of commercial building in a world increasingly concerned with business (see Chapter [14]).