If you know where and how to look in London today, there isn’t much that separates the present from the past. Stand in Piccadilly, just across from the Ritz Hotel, or walk around the block and keep your back to Berkeley Square, and a little imagination can work wonders. It will return you to an era of wigs (and Whigs), highwaymen and oil lamps, when two elegant town houses by two of Britain’s greatest architects shared a remarkable boundary.
Facing Green Park is a large Portland stone office block built between the world wars. It’s unexciting, of a type that can be seen all over the capital, and almost a hundred years old, and yet it’s the direct replacement for and thus provides a close connection with one of those two old houses. Behind it, and cowed somewhat by several rather larger, flashier examples of the same thing, is a seemingly unremarkable façade that signals the mutilated remains of the second house. This is their story.
By the middle of the 17th century Britain’s capital was still very small, barely twice the size of the Roman City of London. The Tudor and Stuart ages pushed it further west, following the river as it turned south towards what we now know as Whitehall and north to Oxford Street, but development on the other side of London Bridge was almost entirely absent beyond the settlement around Southwark cathedral. Even after another hundred years, the Marylebone Road – a by-pass for livestock – was driven through farmland.
Such open fields provided generous plots for the nobility to erect handsome houses, however, which began to go up along the principal roads and, later, around the new squares. One was the home of John, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton, who in 1665 built his mansion fronting Piccadilly and with a large garden to the rear. He enjoyed it for only a dozen years before his death, after which his widow sold narrow strips of land either side of the house that were to become Stratton and Berkeley Streets. The house itself was later bought by the Duke of Devonshire with a condition that Berkeley’s descendants could never build to the north of it, preserving the view from those gardens. Renamed, it survived for some years before burning down; rebuilding would involve a key architect of the period, and result in one of its grandest houses.
William Kent was a Yorkshireman whose nascent talent for art and design was boosted by a funded Grand Tour, the cultured English gentleman’s rite of passage. In Europe he encountered the work of Italian architect Andrea Palladio, who a century before had ‘rediscovered’ and then emulated ancient Roman architecture. Suitably inspired, Kent designed Chiswick House for his like-minded patron Lord Burlington and so introduced the Palladian style to England. Kent, Colen Campbell and Matthew Brettingham trumpeted the movement and found willing clients amongst the landed gentry, realising for them austerely elegant country houses such as Holkham Hall filled with extravagant furniture and set in gardens dotted with pavilions.
As with the wealthy ancient Romans they emulated, most gentlemen also had a town house where they conducted business and entertained friends and in about 1734 the 3rd Duke of Devonshire engaged Kent to build him a new house on the Piccadilly site, inside a high brick wall with iron gates and set back behind a courtyard. Completed six years later, the severity of Devonshire House’s exterior – bare brick, with minimal embellishments – belied an interior lavish even by the standards of the day.
A double-height entrance hall led to the public rooms, including the 40-foor-long library. The Devonshire art collection, encompassing paintings, gems, medallions and more, provided conversation pieces and the entire floor was raised above a service basement, an Italian arrangement known as the piano nobile. This was amended a hundred years later when architect Decimus Burton created a new entrance sequence at ground floor level, with a new grand stair leading guests up to enlarged and remodelled rooms including a ballroom. A host of society figures moved through these spaces, from Whig politicians to royalty, as London changed further beyond those walls. The change included that land to the north of the house’s gardens.
Berkeley Square was laid out in 1730, on land retained by the Berkeleys. Houses were built on all sides except the south, in line with the restrictive covenant agreed earlier. It therefore took some ingenuity to provide one of the new houses at the edge of the square – designed by our other great architect – with substantial gardens of its own, and the legacy of this remains today.
The house, positioned just to the south west of the square and facing east across it, was commissioned in about 1762 by John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, from architect Robert Adam, also a Scotsman. Forty years younger than Kent, he too is intimately associated with the Palladian movement but evolved it – along with his brother and father – into a broader, more flexible style that incorporated motifs from other ancient cultures. Astonishingly popular, the resulting approach is seen around Britain and was exported to its then colony, America. Crucially Adam conceived of his buildings as a single work of art, with the internal decoration, furniture and even the carpets contributing to one theme; his exquisite plaster ceilings, cornices and overdoors, originally painted in striking colours, are a hallmark of this work.
Bute sold the just-started house to William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, after only a year – the shell took until 1768 to complete and the décor was still unfinished three years later when Shelburne was widowed, although work appears to have finally concluded by 1775. Drawing rooms, a library and other apartments featured, and held ceiling paintings derived from Roman originals. As with Devonshire house, changing tastes meant George Dance the Younger amended some of this in a subsequent building campaign, adding niches and other flourishes as well as new rooms but Adam’s work is regarded as the best of its kind.
To give Lansdowne House (Shelburne was later created the first Marquess of Lansdowne) its gardens, a broad wedge of green space was preserved just below the square, which thus formed their northern boundary. Berkeley Street ran to the east and Bolton Row to the south, alongside Lansdowne House, but of course stopped short of Devonshire House’s own extensive garden. How, then, could the two gardens be delineated and separated? The answer was Lansdowne Passage, a footpath running east-west between two very high brick walls – that to the south defining the end of Devonshire House’s garden, that to the north the start of Lansdowne House’s. Since fences and the like were permitted under the covenant, both Devonshire and Shelburne got their wish. Others were not so happy, however, as the long, dark passage between Bolton Row and Berkeley Street became a haunt of highwaymen. Shielded from observation, it was the perfect spot to be attacked and its narrowness made escape difficult for anyone cornered by one of these mounted robbers, beloved of myth but nevertheless a genuine threat to the populace of the day. The solution was the fitting of an iron pole at one end of the passage, which narrowed it enough to prevent horses from entering.
Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 was celebrated with a notable ball at Devonshire House; William Waldorf Astor leased the entirety of Lansdowne House at about the same time, taking the houses into another century. Perhaps inevitably, however, the conflict of 1914-18 changed the fortunes of both.
A combination of death duties and inherited debts forced the 9th Duke to sell off family treasures and Devonshire House – contemporary photographs show commercial ‘For sale’ boards atop the wings of this Georgian pile as motor buses ply their trade along Piccadilly. A deal was agreed in 1920 and four years later, as the first radio broadcast by a British monarch opened the Empire Exhibition at Wembley and John Logie Baird transmitted proof-of-concept television images, Devonshire House was demolished. A new block containing apartments and shops arose in its place, with more shops, apartments and offices built on the gardens. The following year saw the loss of Lansdowne House’s gardens for redevelopment; shops and offices were built on the land, themselves replaced in later decades. The house itself was sold to the Bruton Club in 1929, after which came the final indignity – to make room for Fitzmaurice Place, a new road linking Berkeley Square with Curzon Street, which would otherwise cut through the front of the house, its façade was taken down, the principal rooms dismantled and the surviving portion of Adam’s building refaced with some of the retained stones. Extensive remodelling and rebuilding followed, with the resulting composite opened as the Lansdowne Club.
And so by private sale, council decree, taxes, fashion and war was fixed the layout – square, park, streets, houses – of a small piece of today’s central London, even if the memory of how that happened has long-since faded. The garden gates of Lansdowne House do survive, albeit forgotten and forlorn in the ‘Ironwork’ gallery of the V&A, while some of those Adam interiors can still be seen across the Atlantic where the rooms were reassembled in two museums.
Nothing survives of Devonshire House at all – its main gates, now embedded in Green Park’s fence across the road, were designed for another house.
But as you head to the tube of an evening along Lansdowne Row (still a pedestrianised passageway but wider than its predecessor), catching up with the world on your phone, you might hear something that makes you pause. Could it be the clattering hooves of a highwayman?
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