John Nash - The man who transformed London

While London at the beginning of the 19th century was the largest and most prosperous city in the world, it fell far behind many other capitals in the magnificence of its government buildings and the grandeur of its street layout. This was a direct outcome of the limits put on British monarchical authority – and spending power – after the Glorious Revolution, and the concomitant resistence to central authority of any kind.

It is no coincidence that the monarch most widely despised by his subjects since 1688 was the one who encouraged the greatest episode of town planning and large-scale beautification in the history of London, George IV, Regent from 1811 – the year the leases of Regent’s Park fell in. But the person most responsible for the park’s incomparable architectural rim, and for the great sequence of thoroughfares leading south to Whitehall, was John Nash.

Nash’s star is now in the ascendant again, but for much of the last two hundred years his detractors predominated, with mutterings about his shady dealings as a developer, his (or rather his wife’s) improper relationship with his royal patron, his sloppiness as a designer and the shoddiness of his stucco-wrapped buildings. As an architect he was sometimes somewhat broad-brush, but he was master of effects both grand and picturesque. Simply turning his Regent Street masterplan into reality in only ten years was an extraordinary achievement.

Nearly all his surviving buildings, urban improvements and park landscaping in central London are seen on this day, beginning with Regent’s Park and finishing with his Buckingham palace interiors, unquestionably the most regal in the realm.

Dr Tyack is an architectural historian whose book John Nash: Architect of the Picturesque was published in 2013.