Nash Terraces - Part II
And look, here we are, one of the grandest streets in London certainly, the world possibly. Did you ever wonder about the name "Regent" Street? Probably not, but it was named after John Nash's patron, the then Prince Regent who later became George IV. Predating
posted by Ham at 00:02 --
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Comments on "Nash Terraces - Part II"
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Anonymous said ... (03:20) :
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Mo said ... (09:50) :
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Anonymous said ... (10:43) :
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IleDuLevant said ... (11:25) :
post a commentHaussmann is the fellow you are refering to....If he had been on the English-side of the Channel/la Manche his name would have been anglicized to "Houseman", but he wasn't. Sounds life a a name of German origin, methinks.
And the shops keep getting more expensive.
I don't know about Nash's buildings in London, but the interesting thing about the Regency squares in Brighton, built in the same period, though not by Nash, is how badly they were built.
There were cowboys around in the early C18th - not just a C20th phenomenon.
Calypso
It's important to note that the buildings you see here are early 20th century, built to replace Nash's less grand terraces. Regent Street was laid out to form a royal processional route (to imitate the Continental idiom) from the then royal residence of Carlton House (sited on present day Carlton Terrace) to the proposed but never-realised summer house or 'guingette' that would have been sited on what is now The Avenue in Regent's Park. The route was decided upon by joining up plots of land at as low cost as possible to the Crown, hence the 90-degree turn at Piccadilly Circus into Lower Regent Street, which has never been successfully resolved, and the more successful and therefore less obvious turn at All Souls Church. The latter's circular portico is designed to form a frontage viewable from all angles of the road.
Soon after becoming king, George IV decided he preferred the place he spent many happy days as a child, Buckingham House, which Nash helped turn into Buckingham Palace, Carlton House being torn down. And so we have one of the few examples of large-scale planning in London terminated by neither of its original destinations. On the subject of building quality, a lot of Nash's terraces were overhauled in the 1960s when they were often referred to as 'Nash Trash' because of their poor construction. Dan Cruickshank often repeats his half-joking assertion that the reason so many Georgian buildings survived the Blitz is because their loose stonework allowed a blast to blow through them.