Brighton, on England's south coast, 1815. The Prince Regent George, future George IV, has already turned a simple country house into a neoclassical pavilion, but he wants more: something to astonish his guests. He calls the architect John Nash, who over the following years wraps the building in an Indian and Islamic fantasy — onion domes, minarets, pierced windows — while inside he has rooms built in Chinese style, with gilded dragons, painted bamboo and a six-tonne chandelier hanging over the banqueting table, held up by a silver dragon that seems to carry it effortlessly. The Royal Pavilion, completed in 1823, is the most extravagant building of the English Regency, and its architect is the same man who, in London, is redrawing the face of the capital.
A late-blooming architect
Nash is born in London in 1752, the son of a hydraulic engineer, and begins his architectural career only after forty, following an early business failure and a period spent building country villas in Wales with the landscape designer Humphry Repton. He is a practical architect more than a theoretical one, skilled at quickly giving shape to his clients' ideas, and it is this very gift that leads him, around 1806, to become the Prince Regent's trusted architect. Their collaboration produces London's most ambitious urban project since the Great Fire of 1666: an entire axis linking the prince's residence, then Carlton House, to a great park north of the city.
The plan, approved in 1811, includes turning Marylebone Park into a great landscaped park — today's Regent's Park — surrounded by terraces of grand houses with classical white-stucco façades, and linked to the centre by a new street, Regent Street, cutting diagonally through the city's medieval fabric. Nash designs the street not as a simple connection but as a sequence of urban backdrops: curved colonnades, like the famous Quadrant, that change the perspective at every step, deliberately meant to visually separate the elegant districts to the west from the working-class ones to the east.
The stucco that imitates stone
The material that makes all this possible, at a speed and within a budget that real stone would not have allowed, is stucco: a cement-based render, applied over cheap brick masonry and then painted or scored to imitate cut stone. Seen from afar, the terraces of Regent's Park look like continuous white stone palaces; up close one sees the smooth render surface. It is a compromise between ambition and budget that becomes the recognisable style of the English Regency, and that lets Nash build an entire area of London in a few decades.
At the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, however, the material that stands out most is iron: the onion domes crowning the building hide an internal cast-iron structure, one of the first applications of this industrial material to a ceremonial building, and the staircases are also of cast iron painted to imitate bamboo. Nash thus combines, in the same building, a fantastical decorative language, drawn from prints and travel drawings more than direct knowledge of India, with a construction technology cutting-edge for its time.
A fall as fast as the rise
Nash's most ambitious project, the extension of Buckingham Palace commissioned by George IV in 1825, also becomes his downfall. Costs balloon well beyond the budget approved by Parliament, and the king's constant changes of mind, altering the design repeatedly mid-construction, make things worse. When George IV dies in 1830, Nash loses his protector: a parliamentary inquiry accuses him of mismanaging public funds, and although never formally convicted, he is dismissed from the royal commission. He dies three years later, in 1835, at his house on the Isle of Wight, without seeing Buckingham Palace completed, which other architects finish with substantial changes to his original design.
A fake village for real pensioners
Before redesigning London, Nash tries the opposite idea: a village that looks as if it was never designed at all. At Blaise Hamlet, near Bristol, in 1811 he builds nine cottages for the former employees of the Quaker banker John Scandrett Harford, arranged irregularly around a shared green, each one different from the next in plan, roofline and chimneys, with rendered walls, thatch, exposed brick and diamond-paned windows deliberately mixed without symmetry. It is the fullest example of the cottage ornée style, a building poor in substance — small almshouses, in effect — yet made picturesque down to the last detail, as if it had grown over centuries instead of being designed all at once.
The village comes from the same sensibility that, a few years later, Nash brings to urban scale at Regent's Park: the idea that a landscape, even one built from scratch, should look natural and varied, never geometric and repetitive. Blaise Hamlet today belongs to the National Trust, the British body for the protection of historic and natural sites, and can be freely visited from the outside: the houses remain private homes, but the shared green is open to the public. It is a useful reminder about Nash: the same architect capable of the great stuccoed urban terraces could also design, in miniature, the opposite illusion — that of a place architecture had never touched.