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By Root 2046 0

completing his apprenticeship, he embarked on a career that showed more enterprise than triumphs, at least in its early days. In 1778, as a career-starting speculation he designed and built two groups of houses in Bloomsbury, which were among the very first (if not the very first) in London to be covered in stucco. Unfortunately, the world was not yet ready for stucco-clad houses, and they didn’t sell. (One of them remained empty for twelve years.) Such a setback would have been challenging enough in propitious circumstances, but in fact Nash’s private life was simultaneously unraveling in a rather spectacular manner. His young wife turned out to be not quite the catch he had hoped for. She ran up stupendous, unpayable bills at dressmakers and milliners all over London, and twice he found himself arrested for debt. Worse, he discovered that while he was extricating himself from these legal difficulties, she had been engaged in energetic frolics with others, including one of his oldest friends, and that the two children of his marriage were not in all likelihood his (and indeed may each have had a different father).

Bankrupted and presumably just a touch glum, Nash shed his wife and children—what became of them is unknown—and moved to Wales, where he built a new, less ambitious career and seemed poised to play out his life as a moderately successful architect of provincial town halls and other municipal structures.

And so his life passed for some years. But in 1797, at the clearly advanced age of forty-six, he returned to London, married a much younger woman, became a close friend of the Prince of Wales—the future King George IV—and embarked on one of the most important and influential architectural careers anyone has ever had. What accounted for these sudden changes has always been a mystery. The rumor, widely circulated, was that his new wife was the prince regent’s mistress and that Nash was merely a convenient cover. It is a not unreasonable presumption, for she was a real beauty and time had not made Nash any handsomer. He was, in his own words, a “thick, squat, dwarf figure, with round head, snub nose and little eyes.” But as an architect he was a wizard, and almost at once he began to produce a string of exceptionally bold and confident buildings. At Brighton he transformed a staid existing property known as the Marine Pavilion into the colorful domed fireworks of a building known as the Brighton Pavilion. But the real changes were in London.

No one, other than perhaps the Luftwaffe, has done more to change the look of London than John Nash did over the next thirty years. He created Regent’s Park and Regent Street and a good many of the streets and terraces around, which gave London a rather grand and imperial look that it had not had before. He built Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus. He created Buckingham Palace out of the lesser Buckingham House. He planned, though he did not live long enough to build, Trafalgar Square. And he covered almost every bit of everything he built with stucco.

II

Brick might have been permanently marginalized as a domestic building material but for one important, unexpected consideration: pollution. By the early Victorian era coal was being burned in England in positively prodigious quantities. A typical middle-class family could burn a ton a month, and nineteenth-century Britain suddenly had lots of middle-class families. By 1842, Britain was using two-thirds of all the coal produced in the Western world. In London the result was a near-impenetrable gloom through much of the year. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories the detective has to strike a match—in daytime—to read something written on a London wall. So hard was it to find one’s way that people not infrequently walked into walls or tumbled into unseen voids. In one famous incident, seven people in a row fell into the Thames, one after the other. In 1854, when Joseph Paxton suggested building an eleven-mile-long “Grand Girdle Railway” to link all the principal railway termini in London, he proposed to build it under glass