Curiously enough, the first Regent’s Park terrace, built in 1821 while construction was still proceeding in Park Square, was at least nominally by young Decimus Burton (1800-81), the talented son of the builder James Burton, who was as active here in these years as in Bloomsbury. Dignified and severe, although not Grecian in detail like the handsomer Ionic York Terrace and its flanking Doric villa completed the next year, Cornwall Terrace certainly lacks the specifically Nashian qualities. Happily typical of Nash’s response to urbanistic opportunities is the way he opened York Gate in the middle of York Terrace through to the Marylebone Road in order to incorporate visually the new façade provided by Thomas Hardwick (1752-1829) in 1818-19 for the Marylebone Parish Church.
Sussex Place of 1822, with its curved plan and its ten domes, is much more notably Picturesque; but the most spectacular composition of all is Cumberland Terrace, Nash’s in general conception, but executed by James Thomson (1800-83) in 1826-7 (Plate [32]). This is far more palatial, at least superficially, than the rather humdrum Buckingham Palace that Nash was gradually erecting for the King from 1821 on.[[75]] When seen through the trees of the park or in sharp perspective from the ring road, this range of houses provides a Picturesque three-dimensional composition of a dream-like order—what matter if the conventional Classical elements are organized and executed in a very slapdash way?
The total scope of the Regent’s Park development provided a ‘New Town’ in a rather complete sense inspired possibly by Ledoux’s ‘Ville Idéale’. There were detached villas in the park, mews behind the terraces, a market-place to the east, modest two-storey houses near by in Munster Square and, finally, the two Park Villages, carried out by his protégé Sir James Pennethorne (1801-71) after Nash’s ideas from 1827 on. These last are extensions of the Picturesque hamlet, consisting of groups of semi-detached villas some of Italianate, some of Tudoresque character, loosely strung along curving roads, which provide the very prototype of the later-nineteenth-century suburb.
To most of his professional contemporaries, and not least to his associates on the Board of the Office of Works, Soane and Smirke, Nash seemed an opportunist and almost a charlatan. He differed as markedly from the archaeologically-minded Smirke as from Soane, even if he was as ready to borrow Greek orders from the one as incised detail from the other. Despite the independent stylistic position of Soane and of Nash, Britain could hardly have produced a line of archaeologist-architects from James Stuart to C. R. Cockerell—a line at least as distinguished as the French line from Leroy to Hittorff—without developing by this time Greek Revival doctrines quite as rigid and as self-assured as those of France and Germany. From the end of the second decade of the century the Grecian mode was, indeed, rather more firmly entrenched in Great Britain than anywhere on the Continent.
The historical importance of Wilkins’s Downing College at Cambridge has already been noted. If Wilkins was never able to complete this, so that it remained but a fragment of an ideal Grecian college, he had greater opportunities later in London, opportunities which on the whole he muffed. His University College of 1827-8 in Gower Street impressed contemporaries because its central temple portico ran to ten columns in width. It is not otherwise distinguished, and the advancing wings of the quadrangle are not by him. His St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, of the same date, is a much more modest building (Plate [31]). Yet it already shows some of the restlessness, if little of the elaboration, of later Grecian work on the Continent, such as Klenze’s Hermitage Museum in Petersburg. The hospital, although the theme of the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus is ingeniously exploited, lacks the delicacy and elegance of Decimus Burton’s Ionic screen of 1825 across the way (Plate [31]).
The hospital is, however, rather more original than Burton’s nearby Constitution Hill Arch, also of 1827-8, now moved back towards the Green Park. This is one of the two erected in connexion with the new Buckingham Palace and in conscious rivalry of those Napoleon had set up in Paris and other Continental cities. The other one, originally forming the entrance to the court of the palace, is Nash’s Marble Arch of 1828; that was moved to the corner of Hyde Park where Park Lane meets Oxford Street in 1851 after the palace was refronted by Blore in the late forties. Neither arch has the urbanistic value of Benjamin Dean Wyatt’s Duke of York’s Column or of the Nelson Column, erected in 1839 in Trafalgar Square by William Railton (1803-77), because of their very casual siting. Apsley House, as remodelled by B. D. Wyatt for the Duke of Wellington in 1828, rising too high beside the Burton screen, is not altogether an addition to the group at Hyde Park Corner.
Wilkins’s largest and most conspicuous work, and the one which ruined his reputation, is the National Gallery of 1832-8. The long façade of this, extending across the top of Trafalgar Square, is excessively episodic and best seen in sharp perspective looking along Pall Mall East or from the south side of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The order is not Greek, since the columns of the portico Henry Holland (1745-1806) erected in front of Carlton House in the early 1790s were re-used, and the little dome behind the central pediment is almost Byzantine in character. Comparison of this Picturesque-Classical composition with Cumberland Terrace is inevitable; the honours are all Nash’s.
If Wilkins made the first Grecian spurt, it was Soane’s pupil Smirke who held the course. In Trafalgar Square the unified range of buildings built in 1824-7 on the west side that once housed the Union Club and later the College of Physicians contrasts most strikingly with Wilkins’s National Gallery. Heavy, dignified, and immaculately ‘correct’ in its Greek detailing, this block also shows considerable variety in the handling of standard Romantic Classical elements without any such striving for Picturesque effect as the National Gallery. Later additions on the west have not seriously damaged Smirke’s work.
It is highly typical that the most considerable Grecian edifice of London should be a museum and library. The British Museum, begun by Smirke in 1824, was not completed until 1847.[[76]] Its principal internal feature, moreover, the domed Reading Room built of cast iron in the central court (see Chapter [7]), was designed and carried out in the mid fifties by Smirke’s younger brother Sydney (1798-1877). Only the King’s Library was finished rapidly within the twenties to house the library of George III. This is dignified and crisp, if somewhat less immaculately correct than Smirke’s façade in Trafalgar Square.
The characteristic south front of the Museum, one of the most overwhelming examples of Romantic Classical stylophily, or love of columns—there are forty-eight of them—was one of the last portions of the whole to be completed (Plate [33]). The great temple portico and the colonnade that is carried round the inner sides and the ends of the flanking wings was probably not decided on until the thirties; such a redundancy of columns seems to belong well into the second quarter of the century—compare Elmes’s St George’s Hall in Liverpool (Plate [34A]) or Basevi’s Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The façade of Smirke’s General Post Office of 1824-9, with columns used only at the centre and the ends, and two ranges of good-sized windows between, was more characteristic of the usual Romantic Classical balance between columnar display and rationalistic provision for internal function.