The English crescent on parade

Dearest reader, forgive me for a slight change of plan. The swirling skirts of sky-born Fate demand from mortal man acceptance. I couldn’t get hold of the book I intended to discuss, namely Eitan Karol’s Charles Holden.

This does give you the chance to get ahead and potentially know a great deal more than I by the time I do write on it. Anyone keen to outdo me might glance up at Senate House in Bloomsbury, Zimbabwe House on the Strand or 55 Broadway over St James’ Park tube (look out for the Epstein sculptures).

{{ quote Leamington Spa may be the London that never was }}

If you’re feeling more adventurous, the tube stations at the northern end of the Piccadilly line (especially Southgate) are truly spectacular (and often free to visit – the barriers tend to be open).

It also gives me the chance to introduce Holden through a comparison whose fittingness continues to grow on me – namely, with Baron Haussmann, the man famous for the renovation of Paris in the late nineteenth century.

Like Haussmann, Holden was called upon to draw up a plan for a major rebuilding of his capital city. The circumstances were very different. Haussmann had the unstinting support of the emperor Napoleon III behind him – land was expropriated wherever it got in the way of his grand scheme. Holden was called upon to offer designs by ill-funded government bodies, which tended to lose their money and change their names before any serious work could be begun. His plans for London were far from Haussmann’s total renovation – he drew up the plans for a rebuilding of the (heavily bombed) centre of London (both the Southbank and St Paul’s) and otherwise focused on extending the tube line into the suburbs. Yet they were both called upon to engineer the transformation of a medieval city into a modern one.

For the post-war London of Holden’s day, the transformation was one of necessity: the medieval streets surrounding St Paul’s had been reduced to rubble in 1940. In Hausmann’s case, it was the wish of a man who was monarch, titular president and Emperor.

There was undoubtedly a social impulse behind the renovation of Paris, but Haussmann’s designs reveal the expression of empire to be at the forefront of the sheme. Classicism is all too often the style of choice for government’s obsessed with power, and Haussmann’s classicism is as grand as it gets. The wide boulevards were an attempt to prevent the building of barricades, a problem that had plagued the revolutionary Paris of the previous decades.

The expression of empire went to the level not just of a representative exterior, but to the organisation of space in such a way as to support that empire. It is an extraordinary illustration of what Foucault describes as the micro-physics of power.

Haussmann’s reorganisation is responsible for bright, clean and orderly Paris we all know and love, so it is interesting to consider why such a feat was not achieved in the gloomy, squalid and chaotic London we love even better. John Nash’s development of Marylebone Park represents a similar attempt (started about forty years before Haussmann first drew up his plans for Paris), though it did not come to encompass the whole of London.

It is responsible for the gorgeous Regency terraces – the gently curving crescents of resplendent opalescence – that characterise the London of St James’ Park. The Regency style used by Nash also uses the language of classicism; but it is more subdued in visual effect, more austere in decoration, less imposing in scale.

Fascinatingly, about a decade after starting his work in London, Nash was commissioned to build a number of terraces on the Willes Estate (east of the Parade). He only succeeded in making a few terraces on either end of Newbold Terrace, the rest being filled in after his death in 1835. As far as I can tell, these terraces are the last works of John Nash. (Are they student houses? If so, may I come for tea?) They are also some of the earliest bits of Regency Leamington, built before the spectacular Landsdowne Circus and Crescent (of William Thomas, mid-1830s).

Surely later contributors to our sometime hometown would have paused, pens wavering with the first creaky machinations of creativity, with a haunting image of the master’s works in mind. Most of Leamington may stem from those first buildings of Nash, and be a continuation of them.

I leave you with a startling possibility: Leamington Spa may be the London that never was, a symphonic unity orchestrated by the masterful hands of a single unified style of towering classical splendour; a stunning display of the greatness of a nation that could file itself in mesmeric uniformity under the auspices of a mad king; two fingers to the French; three cheers for the monarchy; a round of applause for the men and women of…