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Portrait of John Nash

Architecture · Classical & Renaissance

John Nash

1752–1835 · British (English)

Regency classicism and the Picturesque

John Nash was the architect of Regency London and the favourite of the Prince Regent, later George IV. Bankrupt at thirty and rebuilt as a country-house designer in partnership with the landscape gardener Humphry Repton, he went on to cut Regent Street through London, lay out Regent's Park with its stucco terraces, turn Buckingham House into a palace and dress the Brighton Pavilion in Indian domes. He worked in any style that suited, and in stucco rather than stone.

How to spot them

  • ▸Cream stucco painted to look like stone — 'Augustus at first found Rome of brick and left it of marble; but is not our Nash a very great master? He found us all brick and he left us all plaster'
  • ▸Picturesque planning: a grand sweep of terraces round a landscaped park, with villas glimpsed through trees
  • ▸Any style to order — Gothic, Italianate, cottage orné, and Indian for the Prince Regent
  • ▸Buckingham Palace's overspend, which lost him his career when George IV died

Key buildings

A seaside palace for a prince, Indian onion domes and minarets outside and Chinese dragons and a cast-iron palm-tree kitchen inside (1815–1823)

Brighton, East Sussex

The Royal Pavilion, remodelled for the Prince Regent; a military hospital for Indian troops in the First World War.

A grand new street curving through the West End to link a prince's house with his new park, cutting off Soho from Mayfair (1814–1825)

London, England

Regent Street, with its Quadrant; almost nothing of his fabric survives above ground.

A former hunting ground laid out with a lake, a canal and grand stuccoed terraces, and villas set as if in open country (1811–1830s)

London, England

Regent's Park and its terraces, developed on the Crown's Marylebone Park estate.

A white marble triumphal arch built as a palace gateway, moved in 1851 to a traffic island at the top of a famous shopping street (1827–1833)

London, England

Marble Arch, modelled on the Arch of Constantine and moved from the palace forecourt during Blore's remodelling.

A ducal town house enlarged into a royal palace at a cost that got its architect dismissed (1825–1830)

London, England

Buckingham Palace; after George IV's death in 1830 a parliamentary inquiry ended the architect's public career, and Edward Blore finished the job.

A church with a circular portico and a needle spire, placed to close the view where a new street changes direction (1822–1824)

Langham Place, London

All Souls, Langham Place, now next door to Broadcasting House; its round portico solves the kink in Regent Street.

A sweep of stuccoed houses behind a giant Ionic colonnade, facing a park across a busy road, with two terraces meant to be linked (1827–1832)

St James's, London

Carlton House Terrace, built on the site of the Prince Regent's demolished Carlton House.

A hamlet of nine deliberately quaint cottages with thatched and tiled roofs, grouped round a green near Bristol (1811)

Henbury, Bristol

Blaise Hamlet, built for the Quaker banker John Scandrett Harford's retired servants — the model picturesque village.

Key ideas

  • The picturesque applied to a city: a street should unfold as a sequence of views, not a straight vista
  • Stucco over brick lets a speculative terrace look like a single palace
  • A park can pay for itself if it is ringed with grand houses and threaded with villas

Quick-fire facts

  • •He went bankrupt in 1783 after a failed London speculation and retreated to Wales before rebuilding his career
  • •He worked in partnership with the landscape gardener Humphry Repton from about 1792; the partnership ended in acrimony
  • •Regent Street was laid out to connect Carlton House with Regent's Park, and its line deliberately separated fashionable Mayfair from Soho
  • •He rebuilt the Haymarket Theatre and remodelled the King's Opera House; Park Crescent and Cumberland Terrace are his
  • •George IV's death in 1830 left him exposed over Buckingham Palace's costs; he received no knighthood and got no further public work
  • •The couplet on his stucco — 'He found us all brick and he left us all plaster' — was a contemporary jibe
  • •He retired to East Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight, which he had built for himself; it was demolished in the 1960s
  • •His St James's Park and Trafalgar Square schemes were carried out by others after his fall

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

  • John Summerson — Architecture in Britain 1530–1830
  • John Summerson — Georgian London