By Francesca Peacock
What links a rotunda on Woolwich Common and Marble Arch? Buckingham Palace and the Regent’s Canal? Brighton Pavilion and the Theatre Royal, Haymarket? Answer: John Nash, favourite architect of the Prince Regent (later King George IV), who developed huge swaths of London in the early years of the 19th century. Many of the city’s iconic sights, from St James’s Park to the white, stucco-fronted villas of Regent’s Crescent, bear Nash’s fingerprints.
But while Nash’s developments are now integral to London’s architectural identity, they got off to a rocky start. In the 1780s, he invested his money into building a terrace of houses in Bloomsbury, but went bankrupt when the properties failed to sell. The architect relocated to Wales, designing country houses around Carmarthen before he could stomach a return to London more than a decade later. There, helped by his political affiliation with Charles James Fox and the Whig party, he caught the eye of the soon-to-be Prince Regent. By 1806, he had a position in the Crown’s Office of Works and, by the 1810s, counted the Regent as his main client.
It’s this period of work that cemented Nash’s legacy. From Westminster to Marylebone he rebuilt central London to his and the Prince’s designs, centring around a triumphant ceremonial route between St James’s and Regent’s Park (main picture, top). Nash was the architect of the monarch’s wildest dreams, from a party rotunda in the garden of Carlton House (which now sits in Woolwich), to a grand expansion of Buckingham Palace after the Prince became King. Around Regent’s Park — in the roads Nash built with Decimus Burton, son of James Burton, one of the most successful property developers of the era — his houses continue to command impressive sums, with one in Hanover Terrace currently on the market for £19mn. It’s a price that would have pleased Nash and Burton: the property was the last in a long line of developments designed to tempt aristocrats and wealthy Londoners westwards, away from Clerkenwell, the City and Soho.
For an architect so eminent, so enduring, a neat encapsulation of his style can be oddly hard to pin down. In many ways, it’s not one of city architecture. Nash’s vision for St James’s Park — where he replaced the straight lines of the canal with a lake and the formal square gardens with curving paths — belongs to the 18th-century “Picturesque” movement; all studied informality and Arcadian wildness, as if the whole of the countryside were included within the bounds of a park or garden. His plan for Regent’s Park followed similar lines, maintaining a feeling of the rural life that had preceded the area’s development. He added villas amidst lakes and greenery, and terraced crescents designed to look like grand country seats. Here is the expanse and individuality of the Englishman’s manor house, transposed to city life.
Nash was a magpie for architectural styles. While his base was often neo-classical, he eschewed plain Georgian edifices in favour of stucco embellishments and ornamentation. From Italianate asymmetry to neat rows of Ionic columns, his buildings can vary vastly in appearance. The cold, austere elegance of his church near Oxford Circus, All Souls Langham Place, looks to be built in a different language to the domes of his Royal Pavilion in Brighton. And yet each building has its own sense of coherence, an ability to locate its various styles within a sophisticated whole.
Unfortunately for Nash, his career ended in much the same way it began — with money difficulties. The splendid development of Buckingham Palace hadn’t been cheap and, with the King’s death in 1830, Nash lost his champion and protector. With the Palace still unfinished — and vastly over-budget — Nash retired in disgrace to the Isle of Wight, where he died in 1835. But much of his distinctive vision for London still survives: his Arcadia in an urban setting.
Photography: Florilegius/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; UK Sotheby’s International Realty; Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images
