Here’s a walk that includes some of the finest buildings in the country, and one in which you’ll also learn about the origins of the terraced house – the greatest contribution these islands have made to world architecture.
Begin at St James’s Palace, London. The closest tube is Green Park. Go right out of the tube along Piccadilly and take the second right down to the bottom of St James’s Street.
At the end of the street, you’ll see the very prominent 1532 gatehouse of the palace, built by Henry VIII – of the classic double-towered Tudor type, seen also at Eton, Hampton Court and Lincoln’s Inn.
To the right of the gatehouse, you’ll see an enormous window made up of 162 rectangular panes with little pinched tops to each individual window.
This is the main window of the Chapel Royal, built in the 1530s by Henry VIII. Just on the other side of the glass Prince Albert married Queen Victoria on February 11th, 1840. Royal obsessives will also know that this is where the Duchess of Cornwall’s granddaughter, Lola Parker Bowles, was christened in June 2008.
The chapel – open for Sunday services, giving the only public access to St James’s Palace – is also a striking example of the last flush of Gothic architecture, before the arrival of classicism, the Perpendicular period.
Very handily, that arrival is illustrated just across the road at the Queen’s Chapel - also open for Sunday services. With its pediment and pillars in cream and yellow paint , this was the first classical church in the country, built by one of its greatest architects, Inigo Jones. For half a millennium, Gothic had been the accepted Christian style for churches. What a shocking sight the chapel must have been.
Jones built the chapel in 1627 in an Italianate style appropriate to Charles I’s Catholic Queen, Henrietta Maria. Their marriage was the first time a Protestant prince had wed a Catholic princess, and the Pope had to give special permission for the union.
On the night of 5 September 1997 the body of Diana, Princess of Wales, lay in the Queen’s Chapel, a handsome classical building opposite St James’s Palace. The coffin was presided over by the Reverend William Booth, the Queen’s Chaplain, and Paul Burrell, her butler-cum-rock. Burrell claims to have placed in her hands some rosary beads, a present from Mother Teresa, who died in the same week as the princess. For her final outfit, Princess Diana plumped for a black, long-sleeved Catherine Walker dress that she’d bought only a few weeks before.
Turn right past the front of the Queen’s Chapel and head through St James’s Park to Horse Guards Parade. Go through the arch of this splendid Palladian palace, built in 1760 by John Vardy.
On the other side of the arch, you’ll see the only other classical building in London at the time the Queen’s Chapel was put up – this is Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House of 1622, where Charles I was executed.
The Banqueting House owes much to the palaces built in northern Italy half a century earlier by the great architect, Andrea Palladio (1508-80).
That rustication – the division of the ground floor into big, chunky, supposedly rustic stones – was a classic Palladio device. As was the thing of having the tallest windows on the first floor, or the grand floor or, as the Italians would have it, the piano nobile. And the most prominent device – that series of pillars on the façade, with a heavy cornice above, was also an Italian Renaissance motif.
All these things, however grand, also have a tremendously influential effect on the humble British terraced house.
To see how, walk left up Whitehall, across Trafalgar Square, back into Pall Mall and right into St James’s Square.
There, at number 20, you’ll see how directly the 18th century houses of St James’s Square followed Inigo Jones. This was built by Robert Adam in 1789 for Sir Watkin Williams Wynn. There are all the familiar motifs - rusticated ground floor, giant pilasters (that is, flattened columns), a piano nobile with taller windows than the other floors, and a heavy cornice above those pilasters.
Further on, at number 15, Lichfield House, you’ll see a simpler version of the same device. Built by James Stuart, the great Greek Revival architect in 1766, it has Ionic columns on the first floor, with the piano nobile taller windows and rustication on the ground floor, cornice above.
15 St James's Square
Then, two doors down, at number 13, now the Cyprus Embassy, built in 1740 by Matthew Brettingham, you’ll see the next stage in the life cycle of the terrace. In around 1730, builders started putting up terraces without the pillars. But, crucially, they retained the proportions as if the pillars were still there. The tallest window is still on the ground floor which remains rusticated, the first floor windows are still the tallest and the cornice from the old pillars remains behind.
This was the prototype that pervaded throughout the 18th and 19th century on the terraced house. The model was simplified on humbler houses – sometimes the ground floor just had horizontal grooves, not the full chessboard pattern; sometimes it was simply plastered while the rest of the building was of exposed brick. For a good example of a normal terraced house that borrows all these grand palazzo principles, you could look at a building in Holloway, north London, the original inspiration for Mr Pooter’s house in Diary of a Nobody. I wrote about this in the Spectator.
Ponder the transformation from palazzo in the Veneto to your terraced house or flat as you continue walking east along the square, before turning left into Duke of York Street and then left again on Jermyn Street and back to Green Park tube.
Posted 27/10/2008 17:12:01 by Harry Mount with 0 comments.
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