London: The Biography

Such an exercise in architectural uniformity, however, could never succeed. London was too large to be dominated by any one style or standard. Of all cities it became the most parodic and the most eclectic, borrowing architectural motifs from a score of civilisations in order to emphasise its own position as the grandest and most formidable of them all. Indian, Persian, Gothic, Greek and Roman motifs vied for position along the same thoroughfare. It says much for the heterogeneity of its development in this period, for example, that architects as unalike as Robert Adam and William Chambers were working within a few hundred yards of each other on strikingly different projects which leave their mark upon London still; Chambers was presiding over Somerset House, while Adam was working upon Adelphi. Where Adelphi had a light and extravagant aspect, Somerset House was solid and conservative in feeling; one is the work of innovative genius, the other of academic solemnity. Both architects found a place within the city.

The only successful and permanent attempt to bring uniformity and order to London’s chaos was the grand scheme to link St. James’s Park in the south with Regent’s Park in the north. With the creation of Regent Street and Waterloo Place, it remains the single most important exercise in city planning within the metropolis. That it worked is not in doubt; the combination of the genius of John Nash with shrewd speculation was perhaps unstoppable in such an opportunistic age and city. Nash formulated the plans for Trafalgar Square; he created the conditions for Piccadilly Circus; he designed the reconstruction of Buckingham Palace; he laid out the terraces on the perimeter of Regent’s Park; he created Oxford Circus. “London,” wrote Prince Pückler-Muskau in 1826, is “extremely improved … Now for the first time, it has the air of a seat of Government, and not of an immeasurable metropolis of ‘shopkeepers’ to use Napoleon’s expression.”

But this “air” of government was only achieved by demarcating poorer and richer areas, in effect cutting off the rich from the sight and odours of the poor. Nash himself declared that he wished to create a line or barrier “between the Streets and Squares occupied by the Nobility and Gentry” and “the narrow Streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community.”

It has been suggested that Nash’s achievement was out of keeping with the history and atmosphere of the city, but he was a Londoner by birth, probably homosexual, who became prosperous through a legacy from a merchant uncle; here was a man who understood in every sense the workings of the city. From these roots sprang his genius for theatricality, for example, and it has been observed that the curve of Regent Street resembles that of an amphitheatre. The great designs of Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace and Oxford Circus have been in turn seen as a form of popular stage-set combining all the energy and spectacle of London in a great work of cunning artifice. When Nash took advantage of the reversion of Marylebone Park to the Crown in 1811, and fashioned Regent’s Park out of an undistinguished patch of land, all his skills as a theatre designer were used to project a grand double circus with what was described as a “National Valhalla” rising in the centre. Financial restrictions, however, made such a scheme implausible and impossible; what emerged from the wreckage of Nash’s ambition were eight villas and the ring of terraces which still possess what Sir John Summerson has described as “an extravagant scenic character … dream palaces, full of grandiose, romantic ideals” but, behind the scenes, comprising “identical houses, identical in their narrowness, their thin pretentiousness, their poverty of design.” He concludes that the terraces of the park are “architectural jokes … an odd combination of fantasy and bathos.” Yet in that sense they convey the sheer vulgar theatricality and opportunism of the city, and of Nash himself; that is why the great tourist attractions of Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square seem in a sense to be a joke upon their visitors themselves.