Nash, John

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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b. c. 1752 (?) London, England

d. 13 May 1835 Cowes, Isle of Wight

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English architect and town planner.

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Nash's name is synonymous with the great scheme carried out for his patron, the Prince Regent, in the early nineteenth century: the development of Marylebone Park from 1811 constituted a "garden city" for the wealthy in the centre of London. Although only a part of Nash's great scheme was actually achieved, an immense amount was carried out, comprising the Regent's Park and its surrounding terraces, the Regent's Street, including All Souls' Church, and the Regent's Palace in the Mall. Not least was Nash's exotic Royal Pavilion at Brighton.

From the early years of the nineteenth century, Nash and a number of other architects took advantage of the use of structural materials developed as a result of the Industrial Revolution; these included wrought and cast iron and various cements. Nash utilized iron widely in the Regent Street Quadrant, Carlton House Terrace and at the Brighton Pavilion. In the first two of these his iron columns were masonry clad, but at Brighton he unashamedly constructed iron column supports, as in the Royal Kitchen, and his ground floor to first floor cast-iron staircase, in which he took advantage of the malleability of the material to create a "Chinese" bamboo design, was particularly notable. The great eighteenth-century terrace architecture of Bath and much of the later work in London was constructed in stone, but as nineteenth-century needs demanded that more buildings needed to be erected at lower cost and greater speed, brick was used more widely for construction; this was rendered with a cement that could be painted to imitate stone. Nash, in particular, employed this method at Regent's Park and used a stucco made from sand, brickdust, powdered limestone and lead oxide that was suited for exterior work.

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Further Reading

Terence Davis, 1960, The Architecture of John Nash, Studio.

——1966, John Nash: The Prince Regent's Architect, Country Life.

Sir John Summerson, 1980, John Nash: Architect to King George IV, Allen \& Unwin.

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