South Kensington Living
John Nash (1752—1835)
John Nash was the son of a Lambeth millwright. Soon after completing his training as an architect, he went into business on his own, and by 1780 he was building stucco-fronted houses. Covering an entire façade in stucco was almost unknown in London at the time. Usually stucco did not rise above the main floor. It was a style Nash was to be loyal to throughout his house designing career. Still it was not a success at the time; Nash went bankrupt in 1783 and retired to Wales. Next he joined up with Humphry Repton, who was to be a famous landscape gardener, and they developed a fashionable practice together designing country houses.
Nash became the leading exponent of the Picturesque style of architecture, whose practitioners emphasized interesting asymmetrical forms and a variety of textures. Their inspiration was the variety of form offered by rugged and dramatic landscapes. It was a style which made an association with a landscape gardener a very natural one. Nash deliberately broke the classical rules of symmetry and his buildings often had irregular silhouettes, which would have been heresy in the previous age.
Nash’s output was considerable and he did not feel constrained to follow any one style. He built a house in Cronkhull in the style of an Italian farmhouse, and thatched cottages at Blaise Hamlet. Ravensworth Castle was Gothic. He used Indian and Chinese elements in his designs for the Brighton Pavilion.
He was a member of the Prince Regent’s circle. The future George IV was a great patron of the arts. George III was declared mad in 1811 and the future George IV was declared Regent - hence the Regency period. Nash finally came into his own at the age of sixty. Between 1815 and 1821 Nash extensively remodeled the Brighton Pavilion for the Regent in a mainly “Chinese” style. In the 1820’s George awarded him the commission to design a great new estate on the Crown land of what was to be called Regent’s Park and Regent Street. His designs included villas and enormous terraces and crescents of private houses. Everything was built in lavish style with grandiose stucco façades. There are also cottage terraces and make-believe villages of barge-boarded and Italianate villas. Only All Souls, Langham Place remains of his Regent Street houses. The whole scheme was conceived as ultimately forming a huge circle, but only the main semi-circle of Regent’s Park was built.
Nash also built Clarence House and Carlton House Terrace in London. He also began work on an extensive remodeling of Buckingham Palace. George IV was a much-hated king and his favorites shared in the hatred. George tried to get Nash made a baronet, but was thwarted by the implacable opposition of the Duke of Wellington. When his royal patron died in 1830, Nash was promptly sacked from all his pubic appointments, including Buckingham Palace, which was completed by Edward Blore and accused of profiteering. It also became clear that much of his work on the palace was unsafe and it had to be redone. It was half a century before Nash’s reputation recovered.
