REGENCY BRIGHTON
By JOHN SUMMERSON
THERE is Regency architecture—and there is the Regency myth. Brighton has very little Regency architecture, but is unques- tionably the seat of the myth. What really happened there between the Prince of Wales's accession as Regent in t8tt and his coronation as George IV in 1821 almost entirely concerns one building—the Royal Pavilion—and even that was only fully completed in time for a grand ball given by the new King in February, 1821. And yet everybody will have it that Brighton is Regency. It does not matter. Myths are -universally enjoyable, and usually contain a valuable pro- portion of truth, whereas strict history is a wingless creature, incapable of becoming air-borne on those gusts of admiration in whose absence history itself could scarcely contrive to live. So let us, by all means, cultivate the Regency myth and let it be enthroned at Brighton. Nobody is going to deny that the Regent did love Brighton and did live there, as Prince, Regent and King ; that the Pavilion, moreover, was far more important to him during its transformation under his Regency eye than it ever was when it stood complete at last as His Majesty's Marine Residence. It was, in fact, at that point that its master began to lose interest in it ; and towards the end of his reign he was hardly seen there at all.
But the Brighton we know—the Brighton of interminable stucco facades, of flowing crescents, of bow-fronts which ripple away from the sea along narrow streets, of deep formal squares gravely viewing the English Channel from beneath their pediments—really belongs to King George's reign, to that of William IV and to the first decade of Victoria—those years of busy profusion in architecture which " inherited Regency themes and worked them to death. But what good themes they were! The narrow, bow-fronted house, especially, with its first-floor balcony and verandah—the verandah tip-tilted like something off a pagoda, and the balcony sometimes running straight as a fence across a dozen houses, so that its shadow slips in and out across the lower parts of the bow-fronts. This simple theme was produced out of the English classical tradition like a rabbit out of a hat. It has no august prototypes ; relies on no Palladian phraseology. It is as nearly " pure " ver- nacular as you can find. But when it is repeated along the whole length of a terrace or crescent it has a monumentality of its own. The rhythm is almost Gothic—as Sir Charles Barry uncon- sciously proved when he designed the in-and-out facades on the landward side of the Houses of Parliament. Royal Crescent at Brighton, begun in 1798, is, to my mind, the most noteworthy exposi- tion of this theme, and the facing-material is (of all queer things) black glazed tiles. If, by any fortunate chance, the Regency festivities now proceeding at Brighton should inspire the owners to replace the original sash bars and restore the tiles, Roysil Crescent would be one of the prettiest things on the south coast, as well as one of the most interesting of our minor national monuments.
The black glazed tiles of Royal Crescent make a quaint interruption in the universal stucco which stretches most of the way from Hove to Kemp Town in a three-mile panorama which a writer of 1833 thought was " alone to be equalled in St. Petersburgh." The panorama is anything but formal ; it breaks down into single houses, pairs of houses, short terraces, long terraces and a few grand, retreating squares, like Brunswick Square and Regency Square. The archi- tecture varies prodigiously. Here and there, in single houses, we find the genuine elegance of the Regency ; but for the most part the impression is of slap-dash ingenuity and an immense range of ideas, some rather bad, others brilliant. Look, for instance, when you are at Brighton, at the Bedford Hotel, where balconies and terraces are most dexterously composed within a rectangular framework purport- ing to be Athenian ; the framework matters little, but the recession and management of planes, from the projecting porch to the wall behind the portico, have real originality and logic. The sea-front squares are rather portentous in their formality. Regency Square (untrue to its name, it was built in the eighteen-twenties) is rescued from ugliness only by the repetitive generosity of its verandahs which, by dramatising the simple act of looking-out-of-window, succeed in humanising what would otherwise be a mere barracks. Brunswick Square, is nobly prefaced by Corinthian blocks running along the sea-front. But for graceful planning it is the Crescents which have the liveliest appeal, for, unlike the squares, they seem reluctant to leave the sea, and curve gently away into the urban hinterland. Adelaide Crescent, with its double curve—concave, then convex— has the loveliest plan, though one could wish that Decimus Burton's fine beginning at the seaward end had not been superseded by the North Kensington style which leads us all too gloomily into Palmeira Square.
The watering-places of England have contributed much to our architecture. It was at Bath, of course, that John Wood, by turning an imagined Colosseum inside out, introduced the circus to our town-planning tradition. It was at Bath, too, that the same architect showed how to group blocks of ordinary houses as commanding units in a plan. At Cheltenham and Clifton the ideas introduced at Bath were brought to their highest perfection and refinement. Brighton had no John Wood, and its contribution is in quantity -and variety rather than anything more fundamental. The architeds of Brighton were not famous men. Nash did nothing there except remodel the pavilion ; and the names of Mr. Wild and Mr. Busby do not occur in the Dictionary of National Biography, although it was they more than anybody who stamped the place with its indelibly " Regency " character. They created Brunswick Square and those massive works for T. R. Kemp—Lewes Crescent and Sussex Square. And to Wild is due the propagation of that peculiar order of architecture in which Ionic volutes are interpreted as their natural prototype, the " ammonite " of the geologist.
One does not go to Brighton merely to gaze at planned stucco or to hunt for Wild's ammonites. The charm and glitter of the place derive from things much older than the Regency—and much newer. On the one hand there are the odd remnants of Brighthelm- stone, the fishing village—squat houses faced with incredibly neat rows of un-knapped flints. On the other hand there are the Victoriana—the rather monstrous galleried hotels and the really splendid churches, epitomising the architectural history of the Anglican revival. Brighton, unlike Bath, is essentially composite, and when one has seen everything one has only just begun to dis- cover how much there is to see. Forty years ago romantic Brighton meant the Steyne, Mrs. Fitzherbert and the later eighteenth century. Then the Pavilion was rediscovered—and the Regency. And now " Regency " expands to take in everything that is stucco and more or less classical, the entire florescence of Brighton's golden age. Regency is a beautiful word, suggestive of mild, affluent dominion. Its adoption in the mythology of an age in which clemency and affluence are scarce is the most proper and natural thing in the world.
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