All these houses indeed of the two Wood’s and the fine shapes into which they combined them seem to show that in times of good taste in the world it is almost as impossible to do wrong in architecture as in times of bad taste it is to do right. How otherwise, except by a general atmosphere of right feeling in such matters and the general acceptance of a canon such as the Palladian one, are we to explain the fact that John Wood, hardly more than a boy and an untravelled one at that, came down from the wilds of Yorkshire and was able not only to change the whole character of a city, but to make it a model of fine urban housing for all time?
XXI.
REGENT STREET, OLD AND NEW
It is so easy, especially in middle age, to be for ever decrying the works of our contemporaries and praising those of our predecessors. This is particularly the case in an art like architecture, where old forms by continued use retain their meaning for centuries, and the significance of new ones is difficult to grasp. The temptation to condemn the new at once as upstart and vulgar is obvious. In comparing therefore the new Regent Street with the old, let us try to keep an open mind. What is it we have lost and what is it we have gained? Let us consider the former first.
Old Regent Street was our one definitely metropolitan street. By that I mean that not only had it a unity, although the individual buildings were by diverse hands, that no other street in London possessed, but it had a superior and welcoming urbanity. It was a smiling sunlit thoroughfare with restful architecture in large and dignified units. Being built in stucco, it could be repainted every spring, and consequently in pre-war days always looked bright and clean. The height of the buildings in relation to the width of the street was such that the sun could reach the façades and be reflected in the bright plaster. There were fine broad wall spaces, particularly in the curved walls of the Quadrant, in the Circuses, and in many of the blocks, which seemed designed to catch the play of passing light and shadow which is a characteristic charm of our climate. But better even than these general factors in the design was the courteous attitude of one building to the other. None were overpowering in height and outline; each deferred to the other by giving some echo of its neighbour in its scale, detail, or composition. The idiom used was of the utmost delicacy, suitable to the material, yet the ideas expressed were masculine and powerful. Each block was conceived like a palace stretching from side street to side street, broad and big in its parts and to a larger scale than any of the new buildings in the new street, however much taller the latter may be.
It was the aristocratic qualities of restraint and dignity, combined with a very urbane good-nature reflected from the brightness of the street and the easy flow of the buildings one after the other which made old Regent Street the happy, lovable place it was not only to London but to the whole Empire. Everyone remembered delightful walks there. To country cousins it was the very essence of the West End. For them it set the note and gave value to all that part of the town. It was, therefore, in every sense of the term, metropolitan. No other capital in Europe had anything like it. The uniformity of the Rue de Rivoli or even of the Avenue de l’Opera was dull and mechanical in comparison. Starting at the base court of Waterloo Place, we saw that Nash had created a magnificent procession of fine shapes, rectangular places, recessed courts, avenues, circuses, the Quadrant and further avenues and vistas, and had lined them himself, and with the help of his architect friends, with a series of stately yet thoroughly English and lovable buildings—a unique achievement in the history of architecture. To the Regent, accustomed to the dark brick buildings which formed the mass of the London of his day, when he first drove down his friend’s street it must have seemed as if Nash had possessed Aladdin’s lamp and with it had created a new and glistening fairyland. To us who remember it before it was broken into, or its plaster and paint allowed to deteriorate, it seems to-day a lovely but almost equally unreal dream: so far has it already receded into the past.
Let us now turn to the new Regent Street which has taken the place of this unique and beautiful possession. Let us remember first that the conditions of control have remained the same. By this I mean that the property is still throughout Crown property, and that the control could have been as tight, and as wise, too, if the same wisdom had been used, as it was in Nash’s day. The Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who administer the Crown Estate, now public property, pass all the designs and lay down any restrictions they desire. They can even impose designs and architects upon their tenants, as they have done in the Quadrant and are doing in Piccadilly Circus.
Let us consider the new street as a whole before we discuss any individual buildings. What is its character? What does it stand for in our civilisation? Has it anything to offer different from, but comparable in value to, the old? Let us take the most obvious effects first. The height of the buildings is different and much greater. So much sunlight will not now enter the street, and the general air of spaciousness is no longer there. The great majority of the designs no longer stretch from return street to return street. The units, therefore, are narrower, more closely packed, and jostle one another. Under such circumstances we cannot expect the same suavity, and we certainly have not got it. The chief place where the present controllers have tried to give it to us is in the Quadrant. We will return to that directly. Then the new street is in a different material from the old—in Portland stone instead of stucco. This has given the buildings a much heavier appearance and in itself is sufficient to alter the whole character of the street. On one side of the street the stone will go black. We can see that already in the Quadrant front to the Piccadilly Hotel. On the other, and in places where the weather catches it, we may expect the stone to take on the beautiful pearly quality Londoners know so well. Now that most of it is white and clean it possesses at the moment a temporary advantage which must not be expected to last. Soon we shall have a black-and-grey street, with occasional high lights like Broad Street, Bishopsgate, or any other City street in the same stone. But it will be a street of big stores instead of the City banks, or of the little shops of old Regent Street.
As we walk down new Regent Street we can already feel its new quality. It is that of parts of Oxford Street, of Corporation Street, Birmingham, or of Lord Street, Liverpool. That is to say, it is a provincial quality. The street is no longer possessed by any dominant idea. The buildings do not harmonise and melt into a single whole. They bear the ordinary anarchic relations to one another we nowadays unfortunately expect everywhere else save in Regent Street. True, the main cornices are at one level, but it is often difficult to distinguish which is the main cornice, so complicated are the new designs. Domes and turrets breaking the skyline and other individualistic advertising features have been allowed. Kingsway, especially in the lower part, is informed by more general ideas, and consequently is a better street. It is this want of submission of the individual building and trader to the whole which has changed the character of the street, and has lowered it from its old high level to that of a commonplace bustling thoroughfare, efficient enough, no doubt, for those who consider it a suburban shopping centre, but not for those who would have wished to see it symbolise again some of the best aspects of our civilisation.
Let us give the Commissioners and their advisers credit, however, for trying in two places to produce a continuous design. Of one, Piccadilly Circus, re-designed as Piccadilly Square, it is too early to speak, except, perhaps, to say that the work already done shows a slightly countrified feeling very different from the abstract character of the old circus. Of the Quadrant, however, where, like all vacillating people who do not wholly know their own minds, the Commissioners changed from the irregularities they had allowed in Lower Regent Street to an attempt to impose upon the shopkeepers a continuous and highly monumental design, more can be said. From the section which was rebuilt some years ago as part of the Piccadilly Hotel, one can envisage the effect of the Quadrant as a whole, if, and when Norman Shaw’s design is carried out. One can see that its character will be something very different from the old Quadrant. In place of that bright and happy spot, with its bold, sweeping, unbroken lines against the sky, we shall have a curved gorge lined with heavily articulated monumental architecture, of a municipal or governmental flavour. If the heavy arches are maintained the little shops will timidly peep out from beneath them. Few trades will survive such heavy-handed treatment. The little milliners and jewellery-sellers will have to give place, perhaps, to tombstone-makers and the agents for cemeteries. The gay character of the street will certainly have gone. We shall emerge from this curving cleft in mountains of stone in no mood to saunter down the rest of the street, as in the old days. But who saunters by great stores? One takes an omnibus or a taxi-cab to the store one selects, plunges in and stays there, perhaps an hour buying anything from socks to tomatoes. The character of shopping has changed, and with it necessarily, the character of the street.