Wilkins and Smirke were not alone in providing Grecian public buildings for the London of George IV. The London Corn Exchange of 1827-8 by George Smith (1783-1869) was an excellent example, less heavy than most of Smirke’s work, less inconsequent than Wilkins’s. Decimus Burton, who provided various gatehouses at Hyde Park as well as the screen at Hyde Park Corner in 1825—the modest ones at Prince’s Gate are almost identical with Schinkel’s tiny Doric temples at the Potsdamer Tor in Berlin—also provided the finest façade in Waterloo Place when he built the Athenaeum there in 1829-30. This clubhouse is severe and astylar externally but grand and sumptuous within to a degree hitherto unknown. Henry Roberts (1803-76), a Smirke assistant, followed his former master closely in the design of the Fishmongers’ Hall built in 1831-3. His great Ionic portico rises as splendidly above the solid substructure that flanks the Thames as Klenze’s Walhalla does above its stepped terraces.
Corporate clients that came to the fore in the thirties saw in the solemn Grecian mode the best means of achieving representational monumentality in their buildings; moreover, they were increasingly ready to employ leading architects in order to obtain it. C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863), the son of S. P. Cockerell, soon to be Soane’s successor as Architect of the Bank of England, began his distinguished career as a favourite servant of the financial world by providing the Westminster Insurance Office in the Strand in 1832 with a range of Doric half-columns. Five years later, in the London and Westminster Bank in Lothbury, he attained a still greater effect of dignified restraint, with no loss of sumptuousness, in an astylar façade of great originality.
The new railways, whose earliest stations had been very modest indeed, were as interested as insurance companies and banks in the representational dignity of Classical frontispieces. At Euston Grove in London, before what was intended to be a double station planned by the engineer Robert Stephenson (1803-59)[5a] in 1835 to serve the London & Birmingham and the Great Western Railways, there rose from the designs of Philip Hardwick (1792-1870) the Euston ‘Arch’, a giant Greek Doric propylaeon; for the Birmingham terminal of the railway at Curzon Street Hardwick provided a second gateway that is more in the form of a Roman triumphal arch. This theme John Foster (1786-1846) expanded into a continuous Roman screen in front of Lime Street Station at Liverpool in 1836. At Huddersfield James P. Pritchett (1789-1868) and his son Charles fronted the main station block in 1845-9 with a Roman temple portico and flanked it with minor colonnaded features. The Monkwearmouth station by John Dobson (1787-1865) of 1848 is similar, but Grecian in its detailing.
More appropriate to modern eyes was the endless red-brick façade designed by Francis Thompson for Robert Stephenson’s Trijunct Station in Derby of 1839-41. This was astylar but had various subtle projections and recessions of the wall plane and a comparable variety of levels in the very long skyline. Thompson also, in the stone towers he designed for Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge of 1845-50, handled his material with a superbly rational directness (Plate [61]). The technical significance of such structures as examples of the new uses of iron which the railways encouraged, must be considered later (see Chapter [7]). Of comparable quality to Thompson’s work is the enormous Royal Navy Victualling Yard at Stonehouse of 1826-35 by the engineer Sir John Rennie (1794-1874)—able son, like Robert Stephenson, of a more famous engineer father and also a brother-in-law of C. R. Cockerell. Despite the severity characteristic of the period, this has an almost Baroque plasticity and vigour of silhouette rarely achieved by contemporary architects before the mid-century.
Except for certain large provincial and suburban Nonconformist churches, the heyday of the temple portico came to an end about 1840. The last prominent example in London is the Royal Exchange, built by Sir William Tite (1798-1873) in 1841-4, but there is nothing Classical about other aspects of this prominent structure. The side, rear, and court façades are in a sort of Neo-Baroque that prefigures the bombast of the third quarter of the century (see Chapter [9]).
Grecian public monuments were as characteristic of provincial cities in the twenties and thirties as of London, perhaps more so. Francis Goodwin (1784-1835)[[77]] provided Manchester with a handsome town hall in 1822-4, now long since superseded. In the latter year he lost the competition for the new Royal Institution there to the young Charles Barry (1795-1860), hitherto most unsympathetically employed in building cheap Gothic churches for the Commissioners.[[78]] This edifice Barry erected over the years 1827-35. Happily it still stands, serving as the Manchester Art Gallery, an excellent example of Barry’s command of that Grecian idiom which his more personal Italianate mode forced into obsolescence even before this building was finished (see below).
In 1828 Foster began the fine Grecian Custom House in Liverpool, completely destroyed, alas, in the blitz; while in 1831 Joseph A. Hansom (1803-82) won the competition for the Birmingham Town Hall with the most striking British example of the temple paradigm. This characteristic Romantic Classical edifice, raised on a high rusticated podium, was slowly executed by Hansom and his partner Edward Welch (1806-68) over the next fifteen years and more.
The more widespread the use of Greek forms became, the less vitality and character they seemed to retain. It is not the columnar detail, so much more correct than that at Regent’s Park, which gives interest to the terraces—built from the twenties on—that George Basevi (1794-1845) designed for Belgrave Square in London or to those of slightly later date designed by Lewis Cubitt (1799-?) and by John Young in Eaton Square; it is the remarkable scale and extent of this newest urban development, rivalling that at Regent’s Park, which was undertaken by the builder Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855), Lewis’s brother, for the Grosvenor Estate behind the gardens of Buckingham Palace.
So also at Newcastle, where Thomas Grainger (1798-1861), with the presumptive assistance of Dobson[[79]] as designer, laid out and built up a series of streets from 1834 on, it is not the more correctly Greek orders that make Grey Street a finer piece of urbanism than Nash’s Regent Street; it is the fine, creamy freestone that replaces London’s stucco and the skilful organization of the ranges of buildings, all so much more carefully grouped and related to one another than in Regent Street, along the curving and rising slope. The Grey Column, built by John Green (?-1852) in 1837-8, is superbly placed in the best manner of the period as a focal accent at the top of the development just like the Duke of York’s Column at the bottom of Lower Regent Street. The cleaning of many buildings has of late much enhanced the attractiveness of central Newcastle.
It was not until the early forties that Greek Revival buildings began to be characterized by contemporaries as ‘insipid’. But Basevi’s façade of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, begun in 1837 and carried to completion with some emendations by C. R. Cockerell in 1847 after Basevi’s death, well illustrates some of the changes that were already coming over Romantic Classical design. As at Wilkins’s National Gallery, the silhouette is elaborately varied—here much more skilfully than in Trafalgar Square. As with Tite’s Royal Exchange, there is also a most un-Grecian sort of plastic bombast. The orders are not Grecian but Roman, moreover, and the spirit is more Roman still, but Roman of the later Empire in the East, as at Baalbek or Palmyra.