Cruickshank's London by Dan Cruickshank

Author:Dan Cruickshank
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473554320
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

Cross Myddelton Square and now walk north along Mylne Street, which leads to the next, and indeed in some respects the best, square of the estate. Claremont Square is, like Myddelton Square, a fascinating study of diversity – some intended and some the result of the exigencies of the speculative building system – within an overall sense of harmonious uniformity.

The west side was built first – between 1815 and 1824 – and looked out over the ‘Upper Pond’ of the New River Company. Since the terrace here arrived before the square was set out (or perhaps even conceived), it was named Myddelton Terrace and built as an adjunct to the already existing Pentonville Road. Evidently Mylne and the New River Company trustees intended this terrace to function as a model for later developments and it introduced a number of ideas that were to become the norm – notably stuccoed and rusticated ground floors, first-floor blank arcading, first-floor cast-iron balconies, and arched front-door openings fitted with fanlights and framed by quadrant columns with Grecian Doric flutes.

This was already becoming the standard vocabulary for house building in London, but nevertheless these dwellings on the west side of Claremont Square are an advanced and fashionable model for 1815 that was meant to ensure that the estate was developed with some visual cohesion. The apparent uniformity of the terrace conceals the fact that it was built by a dozen speculators over a period of nearly ten years. The twelve houses to the north (from the demolished numbers 1 and 1a to 11) came first, from 1815. By 1820, Myddelton Terrace was extended to the south, after it was decided to create a square at this location – organised around the ‘pond’. Numbers 12 to 17 were added between 1820 and 1824, and a straight joint between 11 and 12 shows where work stopped for five years.

Claremont Square. The taller house was built as the home of John Scott, the archly respectable developer who embezzled £10,000 of parish funds.

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