Authenticating Replicas

Authenticating Replicas

by Eftychios Savvidis

“Regent’s Park…”, wrote to her fiancé Robert Browning, poetess Elizabeth Barret in May 1846, “…looked to me like a region of Arcady…the sun was shining with that green light through the trees, as if he carried down with him the very essence of the leaves, to the ground. We stopped the carriage, and I got out and walked, and I put both my feet on the grass… I gathered it in my hands – I laid it against my lips… It was a bit of … Dreamland.”1 And she wasn’t the only one enchanted by this idyllic vision of seemingly unspoiled and uncorrupted by civilization wilderness, natural splendour and harmony. Charles Ollier had found himself in “perfect Arcadia”2, this poetic shaped space, a bit earlier, describing the newly established Regent’s Park and its environs in 1823. The recent transformation of the Marylebone Park to this unique and exquisite urban suburbia, was John Nash’s response to Prince Regent’s architectural megalomania and ambition that he could “quite eclipse Napoleon” through a series of metropolitan improvements in times of political and economical crisis. The whole of this immense plan, carried out by this genius master planner3, was both a bold and original concept, which apart from increasing the “beauty and the salubrity of the metropolis”4, gave a spine to London’s undeveloped -until then- West End, changed the capital’s fate and turned out to be one of the most impressive exercises in town planning in English History.

The Brownings’ Correspondence XII, 317: 11 May 1846, and 323: 12 May 1846 (conflating two accounts of the same incident, written to Robert Browning and Mary Russell Mitford) as found in Mordaunt C., Professor J., London’s Arcadia: John Nash & the Planning of Regent’s Park (2000) 2 Ollier C. Literary Pocket Book (1823) as found in Rabbits P., Regent’s Park: From Tudor Hunting Ground to the Present (2013) 3 Mordaunt Crook and many others treated Nash less as London’s master-planner and more as “an opportunist of genius, responding pragmatically to the pressures of political circumstances and to the fluctuations of urban economics” but never challenged the value and the “imprint of his assimilative vision” in Mordaunt Crook, Professor J., London’s Arcadia: John Nash & the Planning of Regent’s Park 4 Parliamentary Papers 1812, XII, 463: 1st Report 1

That phenomenal change in the evolution of urban planning, the way of approaching urban space in this innovative way and the vision of how the park would be experienced by visitors and residents, and how everyone should perceive and be enchanted by this rare conglomeration of architectural elements and nature5, trademarked the “metropolitan picturesque”. Nash in his highly personalized and idiosyncratic way, developed a series of simple principles and ideas that established the specific concept; and “illusion was certainly one of the chief ingredients in that cluster of ideas and attitudes”6. In this planned urban enclave, buildings and landscape were conceived as interdependent elements in a single entity, with neither taking precedence. All the villas, cottages, houses and terraces scattered around, all acting as focal magnets of a picturesque group, were placed in such ways as “no Villa should see any other” as Nash asserts, “but each should appear to posses the whole of the Park”; and “the Streets of Houses which overlook the Park should not see the Villas, nor the Streets of Houses overlook those of any other street”7. Every resident should enjoy being the sole lord of this very fair substitute of the fields of the country that unfolded in front of their eyes. Every visitor was intended to feel a sense of being enveloped, or absorbed by the landscape and trapped in this introverted suburbia that was, by some king of magic, landed in the city. And every passing spectator should find himself exposed in a sequence of “living pictures”, in a trail of continuous illusion and trompe l’oeils, where each terrace of houses appeared to be a palace and each villa a country seat emerging in a sylvan scenery. The picturesque along with a powerful compound of pictorial illusions, scenic effects, trickeries and deception mechanisms were turned into a marketable commodity, and “open space, free air and the scenery of Nature” appeared to be the perfect “allurements or motives for the wealthy part of the Public”8 to establish themselves into Nash’s new townscape and to be amused and entertained by all the delights that it had to offer.

5 John Summerson called it “a total work of architectural and landscape art” in John Summerson, The beginnings of Regent’s Park, Architectural History, 20 (1977), p.61 6 Rabbits. P, Regent’s Park: From Tudor Hunting Ground to the Present, ed. Amberley, (2013), p.75 7 Parliamentary Papers 1812, XII, 434: 1st Report 8 Ann Saunders, Regent’s Park, A study of the Development of the Area from 1086 to the Present Day, Bedford College (1981), p.11

The key element of this new townscape, responsible for holding all this fantasy and magic together, was the Outer Circle; or as then called: The Ring or Outer Drive. This peripheral highway that formed the boundary of the entire estate and that operated as the mediating physical link between the central open space and the encompassing palacedisguised terraces, it was designed to satisfy the resident’s wish for privacy and the public’s desire for public amenity9. A two-mile-long public promenade that surrounded the park and offered a series of framed views and living pictures, or as Terence Templeton described, “a circular tour of observation”10 This exact unfolding sequence was described in words in the same inevitable way by anyone who intended to give a full account of the park11 and was reproduced over and over again in fascinating nineteenth century hand-drawn panoramas.12 Richard Morris’s thirteenfoot-long panorama of 1831 provides a record of this popular “circular tour” where pedestrians and traffic appear as both consumers and also components of this picturesque scenery, the background of which appeared almost like an assorted collection of wonders of architectural design and execution. Blocks of residential premises appearing as classical palaces and so disposed as to produce scenes of great variety. As Crook claims, “…Regent’s Park Terraces certainly epitomise the precarious balance between Neo-Classical archaeology and Picturesque theory.”13 Their details characterised as “vestigially Grecian”, their forms as “Hollywood Baroque” and their composition “posthumously Palladian”; compositions of great energy and brilliance… “a fantasia”14 as Summerson would add. And they were indeed nothing more than a mere fantasy, and nothing less than another of Nash’s mechanisms. Those stuccoed facades were certainly

Longstaffe – Gowan Todd, Reinstating John Nash’s Picturesque Vision at Regent’s Park, London, Garden History 43: supplement 1, Spring 2015, pp. 87-96 10 Templeton T., London Letters to Country Cousins – No III: The Regent’s Park and its appendages, Court Magazine and la Belle Assemblée, Volume 7. p.117 11 Ann Saunders and John Summerson (and many others after them) followed this path to which they based their narration while presenting a record of the Park’s buildings and features.

12 Nash himself used the power of such panoramas to convince the Prince and to manage to satisfy the Commissioners of Woods, Forest and Land Revenues. [Mordaunt C., Professor J., London’s Arcadia: John Nash & the Planning of Regent’s Park (2000) pp. 6-7] 13 Mordaunt C., Professor J., London’s Arcadia: John Nash & the Planning of Regent’s Park (2000) p.28 14 Summerson J., John Nash (1935) p.195; John Nash (1980) p.124

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superior to that of any other portion of the Metropolis and far preferable to the naked brick walls, but as Ann Saunders assures “they were designed in an air of pretension that they couldn’t support”15. On a hasty view, they present an idea of hypnotising palaces, but a more detailed inspection would show that these seemingly spacious edifices to be only clusters of common-sized, narrow houses with their interiors identical to those in any other nineteenth-century town dwelling. Those facades were never to “contribute to the comfort or real value of the residential buildings but to the grandeur of the Park”16 and Nash was never worried about convenience or detail, but he was putting all his effort for the total effect and the appearance of that fascinating panorama.

Central place in the panorama (so as in written texts, as well as in the nineteenth century imagery) kept always the Park Crescent. This focal point of communication that funnelled the countryside into the city or the point where the city eased into a gracious modern suburb.

This very precious “sort of grand vestibule”17 where Nash invested all of his scenographic power and art and paid more attention in realising than in any other group or building in the park. At this point, at the top of Portland Place, the two noble ranges of mansions, which developed along the architectural avenue that linked Whitehall and Westminster to the Park, branched out, right and left, into the magnificent crescent. Its semi-circular profile, even though only half of what had been originally planned18, offered a decisive curved depth which an elliptical crescent would have lacked. Two identical, symmetrically reflected terraced wings, where again, four storey brick-houses were masked behind numerous columns and tones of stucco and shaped overall as two quadrant curved palaces. But as often with Nash, the whole composition was sleek but

15 Saunders A., Regent’s Park: A Study of the Development of the Area from 1086 to the Present Day, Bedford College, (1981) p.110 16 ibid 17 Templeton T., London Letters to Country Cousins – No III: The Regent’s Park and its appendages, Court Magazine and la Belle Assemblée, Volume 7. p.117 18 Nash initially designed a 700ft in diameter full circus at this site, which was named Regent’s Circus, but in the period of 1817-1821 only half of it was constructed and its northern sector never actually developed.

shallow. The main compositional trick, the enfilade of the continuous ground-storey colonnade with coupled Ionic columns on squared plinths, was limited at the street level whereas the upper floors appeared much less interesting and less elaborated with just in-sequenced openings. Minimal projections and pediments at the ends do something to relieve the simple economy of the plastered elevations completing this “fresh and uplifting piece of unified urban scenery”19.

Regent’s Park entered the twentieth century very much as Nash had left it,20 but since then it evolved and developed its own momentum facing new challenges, which among other would include two World Wars and a significant thread of demolition. However, it was the Second World War that took a heavy toll on the Park and its environs, significantly more so than the First World War had done. After 1941 and by the time the war ended, the showy but lightly built terraces of the panorama were in terrible state. “Villas and terraces stood empty and forlorn”21, whereas the western sector of the precious Park Crescent was irreparably damaged and destroyed. Nash’s legacy was then at an important crossroads and although there were serious considerations about possible replacements and redevelopment schemes to meet modern needs and requirements,22 yet with his reputation in the ascendant, his work could not simply be demolished and erased completely and nothing less than the reconstruction or the restoration to its former state could be contemplated.23 Park Crescent among other six top terraces were rated to be kept at all costs and so the road to replication, rare in Post-war London, was open.24 Little by little the panorama was again up and standing, with the new replica fronts protecting and emphasizing once again the “trapped countryside”, keeping real Nash’s concept and its original design achievements. By 1965 the fantasy has already been restored!

Park Crescent in Survey of London: Volumes 51 & 52, South-East Marylebone (draft chapters, 2016) by then it was no longer perceived as an aristocratic precinct, but more of a resort for all Londoners.

21 Rabbits. P, Regent’s Park: From Tudor Hunting Ground to the Present, ed. Amberley, (2013), p.183 “Two-thirds of the houses were empty; few remained undamaged from blast or bombing; many were no longer weatherproof.

22 ibid. pp.184-186 23 ibid. p.185 24 Park Crescent in Survey of London: Volumes 51 & 52, South-East Marylebone (draft chapters, 2016) 19 20

And then suddenly in 2016 ruptured again…The entire Grade I listed25 western quadrant of the Park Crescent, to everyone’s surprise was taken down and a project for its “restoration” immediately commenced.

This project26, presented a “unique challenge” which positioned on the fact that, contrary to its listing description, the present West Crescent was not the one built to designs by John Nash in 1812, but instead a weak and inaccurate post-war replica27. Its intention was to demolish this “flawed” west half of the Crescent facade and replace it with an authentic replica – as oxymoron as that could be - while modern residential accommodation would be developed behind it. The Historic Building Report28 produced in support of the project’s scheme, demonstrated that “in this very rare case, the complete demolition of the Grade I listed terrace and its replacement with a more scholarly replica would preserve and enhance rather than obliterate its significance”. However, one might wonder, where does its significance actually lie? And in what terms, could an authentic replica manage to preserve and enhance that significance?

Certainly, these concerns touch upon wider issues in historic urban environments and relate to current debates with regards to cultural heritage management. Couldn’t the 1960’s Crescent be considered as an “interesting and unusual” example of postwar reconstruction of a 19th century terrace and worthy of preservation? Could a directed ruinous state of a war-damaged West Crescent operate as a memory disposal of a historic event that was previously completely erased? Or, would a completely new design offer a more decent and honest response than a replication that merely tricks the eye? How can the proposed redevelopment result in a far more historically and architecturally authentic Crescent? It might be

Date first listed: 10 Sep 1954 / Date of most recent amendment: 05 Feb 1970, according to Historic England’s List Entry.

26 Undertaken by Paul Davis + Partners architects and Donald Insall Associates that worked as Heritage Consultants.

27 According to Donald Insall Associates, the heritage statement developed, documents the various flaws to the design including having only five of the original 13 front doors and their associated bridges, the absence of chimney stacks, the one-plan office spaces behind the facade rather than the original modular plan, the painted concrete facades rather than the original stucco and the inaccurate architectural detailing and proportion to features such as the cornices.

28 Found in the Planning Report.

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stylistically consistent to its predecessor, however there are a lot of aspects added up that challenge its appeal to authenticity, and in addition, broach the discussion of the essence of the authentic in general. After all, for whom is the image of the West Crescent preserved and protected?

Is it a matter of collective memory and protection of public sentiment?

What type of values can legitimize its reconstruction besides the marketoriented interests? Period façades could indeed project appeal to another market who likes opulent period-architecture homes with luxury new specification features…

Indeed, West Park Crescent’s current reconstruction raises a lot of questions and constitutes a unique case in the history of preservation and restoration practices in London. But somehow its significance doesn’t seem to lie further than that very early panorama that Nash had dreamed of. Its importance doesn’t seem to endure outside that two-hundred-year old unfolding sequence of the “circular tour”. And that significance could just be preserved and enhanced if that very authentic visual continuance is restored; if that symmetry could be re-established; if that optical illusion could again offer visual pleasure through its deceptive completion. With nothing less honest than meeting its instigator’s intentions, with nothing more of a “fraud” than responding to the initial objectives. After all, Nash never really cared about nothing more than just that façade, than that panorama, than that pretentious backdrop for his Dreamland.

As easily as it came down, West Park Crescent will go up again…

Grade I listed* and gracious. Pretending to be a lot more than it actually is, or ever will be. Remaining one of London’s most memorable episodes of urban planning for those who never knew, a grand paradox for those who will remember. *As Donald Insall Consultants confirmed29, West Park Crescent has, in fact, never been delisted.

In this rare case, permission was granted for the demolition of a Grade I listed building due to the evidences presented, while also keeping its listing. They also assured that when it is rebuilt, the new structure will also be Grade I listed30, making it thus the youngest building ever listed(!), for sure raising more questions and opening wider discussions. in a mail exchange that we personally had.

According to the Heritage Consultants once the project is complete, the developers might request a rewrite of the list description to explain what has occurred. It is doubtful, however, that the building would ever be delisted or even downgraded owing to its highly significant townscape/group value.

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Bibliography Longstaffe – Gowan T., Reinstating John Nash’s Picturesque Vision at Regent’s Park, London in Garden History 43 (2015) Mordaunt C, Professor J., London’s Arcadia: John Nash & the Planning of Regent’s Park (The Annual Soane Lecture, 2000) Rabbits P., Regent’s Park: From Tudor Hunting Ground to the Present, ed. Amberley, (2013) Saunders A., Regent’s Park, A study of the Development of the Area from 1086 to the Present Day, Bedford College London, (1981) Summerson J., The beginnings of Regent’s Park in Architectural History, 20 (1977) Survey of London, South-East Marylebone, Volumes 51 and 52 (2016), draft chapters found on https://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/research/survey-of-london/eastern-marylebone/ Templeton T., London Letters to Country Cousins – No III: The Regent’s Park and its appendages in Court Magazine and la Belle Assemblée, Volume 7, London (1836)

All images courtesy of the author.

Eftychios Savvidis, London 2017 savvidis.eftychios@gmail.com