Walking Palladian London

North Walk: Mayfair

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the architecture of Andrea Palladio
(1508–1580) was a source of great inspiration for a whole host of architects who went on
to produce many of the buildings we now perceive as quintessentially English. Palladio’s
architecture was the subject of much emulation and appropriation, acting as the model for
many buildings of different types and uses, and was often employed by architects to serve
the social and political imperatives of their patrons.
On this walk you will delve into eighteenth-century Mayfair and discover how Palladio’s
architecture was interpreted to provide the basis for the Georgian townhouse.

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Key 1. Burlington House

2. 36 Sackville Street
6. 44 Berkeley Square
7. 2 Davies Street
3. 7 Burlington Gardens 8. 66 and 76 Brook Street
4. 31 and 32 Old Burlington Street 9. 60–61 Green Street
5. 45 and 46 Berkeley Square
Visitor information correct as of January 2009

Burlington House
Remodelled 1717–20
Colen Campbell (1676–1729)
Burlington House was the site of the first foray into
architecture by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington
(1694–1753), who was to define Palladian taste in
England for much of the first half of the eighteenth
century. Burlington was a fabulously wealthy and well-
connected aristocrat who enjoyed a successful career
at Court earning various governmental posts.
His interest in architecture appears to have developed
in the 1710s almost certainly influenced by his travels
abroad, visiting France, the Netherlands and Italy.
The Italian trips, and in particular his visit to the
Veneto in 1719, appear to have been particularly
formative for his architectural ideas. Though he never
inspected any Roman buildings thoroughly himself, he
benefited from the experience of those who had, and
managed to acquire many drawings by Inigo Jones
(1573–1652), who had, as we shall see, introduced
Palladio’s architectural ideas into England in the early
seventeenth century, as well as many of those by
Palladio himself which Jones had acquired.
When only half-built, Burlington House was acquired
by Burlington’s great-grandfather for whom it was
completed in 1668. It was one of several large houses
that had sprung up along Piccadilly in the seventeenth
century, which with their projecting wings and large
enclosed gardens had more in common with country
house architecture than they did with the standard city
house type. Due to the amount of space they occupied
– plentiful in the country but less so in the city – over
time they were sold off by their owners acutely aware
of the value of the land on which they stood. Of these
houses only Burlington House now survives, though,
as will be explained, in radically altered form, with its
former gardens to the north long gone.
Above: Stephen Ayling, South Front of Burlington House, c. 1860s. © Royal Academy of Arts, London William Kent, The Glorification of Inigo Jones, 1719-1720. Oil on canvas. © Royal Academy of Arts, London
In the 1710s James Gibbs (1682–1754) was employed
by Burlington’s mother to make alterations to the
house. However, Burlington, clearly determined to
imprint his own personality on the house, dismissed
Gibbs, and in his place employed the Scottish
architect Colen Campbell. Campbell was the author
of Vitruvius Britannicus (published 1715–25), a kind of
architectural ‘manifesto’ in which he documented the
current state of architecture in Britain and attempted
to formulate and codify a distinctly British architecture
style. In contrast to the perceived extravagance of the
English Baroque architects, such as Christopher Wren
and his followers, Campbell argued for a new English
style based on ideals of calmness, order and rationality
of which Palladio’s architectural production, especially
as it was interpreted by Inigo Jones, was the exemplar.
Between 1717 and 1720 Campbell made Burlington
House into one of the grandest and most up-to-date
London townhouses of its day. Though the second
storey was added by Sydney Smirke (1798–1877) in
1872–73, Campbell’s work on the south façade is still
visible on the ground and first storeys. The rusticated
ground storey, alternating pediments, and restrained
deployment of Venetian windows between paired Ionic
pilasters were all to become staple features and motifs
of the Palladian style as realised in England.
Inside, the staircase was originally placed to the right
of the front hall and rose into what is now the Council
Room. This asymmetry and the absence of a central
emphasis to the south façade – another un-Palladian
characteristic – were determined by the constraints of
working within the existing structure of a seventeenth-
century building. The staircase was repositioned to the
centre where it still resides by Samuel Ware (1781–
1860) in 1815–18.
 Despite the expense lavished on Burlington
House, Burlington soon turned his focus on his
other residence, Chiswick House. Though quite
different, the villa clearly drew from and developed
on Burlington’s architectural ideas as first
practised in Burlington House.

Visitor information
The Royal Academy of Arts is open daily
10am–6pm, Fridays until 10pm.
The John Madejski Fine Rooms (Highlights
from the Permanent Collection) are open
Tuesday to Friday, 1–4.30pm; Saturday and
Sunday, 10am–6pm; closed on Mondays.

Directions to next site

Leave the Burlington House Annenberg
Courtyard to the south and turn left heading
east along Piccadilly. Take the first left and
head up Sackville Street. Now home to a
Jasper Conran outlet, 36 Sackville Street is a
short way up on the left.

Photo © Phil Sayer

To decorate the house’s newly remodelled first-floor

rooms, Burlington employed the painter, and later
architect, William Kent (1685–1748). Though these
rooms are much altered, the Saloon is perhaps the
best-preserved room from Burlington’s time; its door
cases and carved-wood panelling are probably by
Campbell or Kent. Recent conservation work on the
Saloon’s ceiling has also revealed painted decoration
thought to be by Kent. One of Kent’s paintings from
1719–20, The Glorification of Inigo Jones, originally
painted to decorate one of the Fine Rooms, can
now be seen above the stairs leading to the Main
Galleries. The two large canvases flanking the space
by Sebastiano Ricci (1659–1734) – The Triumph of
Galatea and Diana and Her Nymphs – are most likely
a part of the 1710s scheme for the stairs in their
former position. Though perhaps rather formulaic
in composition, Kent’s painting makes clear that
Burlington looked not only to Palladio for inspiration
but to Inigo Jones as well.

36 Sackville Street
1732
Henry Flitcroft (1697–1769)
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts
Henry Flitcroft’s 36 Sackville Street is one of the
best surviving examples of an early-eighteenth-
century townhouse. On first inspection, its plain
four-bay façade appears rather a little austere and
unremarkable especially in comparison to the similar
though usually more ornate façades of the other
buildings that populate the street. Moreover, after
the high Palladianism of Burlington House with its
applied Ionic order, projecting wings and archetypal
Palladian windows, there would seem to be little that
is Palladian about Flitcroft’s humble house.
However, Palladianism as formulated in the eighteenth
century meant more than the correct application
of ornament from a repertoire of key architectural
motifs, though that was certainly how it was often
manifested. It was an architectural philosophy based
on the principles of proportion and harmony, which
was not necessarily confined to large and grand
houses and public buildings but could be adapted to
different situations where such displays of grandeur
were neither appropriate nor affordable. In some
ways, Palladianism’s impact on London’s architecture
was most keenly and long-lastingly felt on the more
modest townhouse, in which the Palladian ideals of
order, simplicity and calmness were, as we shall see,
abstracted to their essence.
By 1700, London was the largest city in Europe with
around 600,000 residents. Its rate of population
growth was extraordinary; since 1600, the population
had tripled in size. Much of the growth was in and
around the city’s existing boundaries, but there had
been a notable expansion west, only heightened by
the Great Fire of 1666, as the rich and well-to-do
abandoned the narrow winding streets of the City in
favour of the increasingly fashionable, more open
and airy suburbs to the west. As an indication of the
contrast with the City’s density, when Christopher
Wren (1632–1723) came to build St James’s Church
Piccadilly, part of the St James’s Square development
in the years following the Restoration, it was one
of only one or two sites where he could build
unencumbered by pre-existing buildings. Sackville
Street was first laid out opposite Wren’s church on
the north side of Piccadilly, but was extensively rebuilt
in the 1730s, during which time Flitcroft’s No. 36 was
put up. Many seventeenth-century terraced houses
were poorly constructed and were replaced in the
1730s and ’40s when their leases expired, which may
have been the case here. While little of the 1730s street
still exists, Flitcroft’s building is a rare and largely
unaltered survival.
As an architect, Flitcroft was very much in the
mainstream of early-eighteenth-century Palladian
thinking as interpreted by Burlington and his circle.
The story of his coming to Burlington’s attention by
falling of the scaffolding while working as a joiner on
Burlington House appears apocryphal, but by 1720,
Flitcroft had become Burlington’s draughtsman and
general architectural assistant, and during the early
1720s he was known to be employed surveying the
site at the new Westminster School Dormitory (which
features in the South Walk). Soon after, through
Burlington’s influence, he gained a position in the
Office of Works and went on to be an accomplished
architect in his own right.
While, as we have seen, the façade of a grand
Palladian building such as Burlington House is
articulated by the use of a repeating classical order,
which provides the composition’s sense of rhythm,
regularity and overall proportion, 36 Sackville Street
is almost totally bereft of architectural ornament. Yet
despite its plainness one can still clearly see the same
Palladian ideals of proportion and harmony clearly
permeating Flitcroft’s design. Instead of featuring Visitor information
in the façade the order is implied through a strictly
Now occupied by a Jasper Conran outlet,
proportional system that articulates the façade as a
36 Sackville Street is open daily.
series of horizontals and verticals. In this system, the
ground floor is visually treated as the basement with
the horizontal banding or string course above the Directions to next site
windows serving to mark the top of the plinth level.
Continue along Sackville Street heading north.
Above, the vertical piers created between stacked sets
When you reach Vigo Street turn left.
of two windows represent the columns. Above this,
7 Burlington Gardens is alongside Savile Row
the cornice running horizontally across the façade,
on the north side of Burlington Gardens.
often emphasised by being dressed in stone or by
a different colour, marks the level of the entablature
with area above representing the architrave and frieze.
So, despite the façade’s near complete absence of
classical features it was possible to imply the orders
through the manipulation of window sizes and
spacings. In this way Palladianism could be stripped
back to its essential qualities of proportion and
rhythm.
Such a rigid and strictly proportional arrangement
of the façade naturally led to planning constraints
internally. Even at this time plots of land were
expensive, so it was economic to build upwards, and
the size of rooms and their position in the house were
usually dictated by practical requirements like the need
for light and accessibility. With its large windows, the
first-floor piano nobile contained the house’s principal
rooms, with kitchens and parlours positioned on the
ground floor for easy access. At 36 Sackville Street,
the ground-floor front room still features some of its
original enriched panelling and carved overdoor with a
mask of Aurora.
Despite these internal planning constraints, the
building’s external form was inherently adaptable to
different-sized plots. It was most common to build
three bays wide corresponding to a four-columned
temple front; however, the four bays of Flitcroft’s
house were not an uncommon arrangement, and
there are examples of even wider single-house
façades. This adaptability was an inherent feature of
such designs. Façades could be broken down into
a series of repeating units – 36 Sackville Street is
constructed from four such units – which could be
combined horizontally and yet still maintain the strict
proportional systems. As we will see, this modularity
was to become a key feature in early-eighteenth-
century and subsequent townhouse design.

7 Burlington Gardens
(formerly Queensbury House)
1721–23 (present façade 1785–89)
Giacomo Leoni (1686–1746)
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts
With Campbell and Kent’s work on Burlington House
almost complete, Burlington’s mind turned towards
the area to the north of the house, then his garden.
Originally laid out in the seventeenth century, by
this time Burlington House’s garden must have
seemed very large, and, as the surrounding area
became increasingly built up, Burlington clearly
sensed the financial rewards, as well as architectural
opportunities, of developing the garden. The resultant
scheme involved dividing off Burlington House
from the Burlington Estate to the north, and, after
securing the necessary Acts of Parliament, laying out
Old Burlington Street, Clifford Street and Cork Street
where the gardens had lain. Burlington Gardens,
the new street running east to west, parallel with the
axis of the house, marked off the northern limits of
Burlington House’s now smaller garden. According
to the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘The
result was the most architecturally ambitious and
imaginative part of old Mayfair’. However, other than
the overall street layout, little of Burlington’s ambitious
scheme now remains.
However, a notable survival from that period, though
an altered one, is 7 Burlington Gardens. It was begun
in 1721 by Giacomo Leoni for John Bligh, later 1st Earl
of Darnley, and, after changing hands, was completed
in 1723 for the 3rd Duke of Queensbury, from whom
it gained its former name, Queensbury House. Leoni
was, as is explained in greater detail in the South
Walk, a Venetian who upon his arrival in England
published the first English translation of Palladio’s
I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of
Architecture, 1570), which was, needless to say,
a highly important event in the history of English
Palladianism. The house changed hands again
later in the century, and its new owner, the 1st Earl
of Uxbridge, employed John Vardy Junior (son of
the architect John Vardy who had worked earlier in
the century on Spencer House, which features on
the South Walk) and Joseph Bonomi in 1785–89
to extend Leoni’s original house. The house also
underwent further alterations in the nineteenth
century.
The subsequent additions and modifications
to Leoni’s original design are apparent in that
the building’s façade, rather uncanonically, now
features ten bays and nine giant Corinthian
pilasters; it was standard practice to have an odd
number of bays so that there was always a void
in the centre of the composition. The seven west
bays represent Leoni’s original house, which was
a double-pile building (two sets of rooms deep),
built of brick with stone dressings. In his alteration,
Vardy added an extra three bays to the east and
refaced the façade in Portland stone, though he did
retain Leoni’s pilasters, which are still visible. Vardy
also maintained another original feature of Leoni’s
design by omitting the pilasters at either end of the
façade – a standard Palladian feature.
Inside the three stone flights of the open-well
staircase to the left are Leoni’s, but the balustrade
with wrought-iron enrichments as well as the oval
coffered dome, skylight and wall painting are later
additions.
Despite these various modifications, externally
at least, it is still possible to detect the outline of
Leoni’s design, which, even in its original brick
with stone-dressing form, would have been, in
comparison to 36 Sackville Street, a far larger and
overall more imposing house.
Yet even such a comparatively grand (and
expensive) house as 7 Burlington Gardens would
not necessarily have been an aristocrat’s principal
residence. That it changed hands several times,
even while still under construction, suggests that
it would have been used as a residence during
the ‘London season’ to host all manner of social
occasions, parties and entertainments, which
would also account for its grand and showy original
appearance.
While 7 Burlington Gardens now stands
opposite the large high-Victorian edifice of James
Pennethorne’s (1801–1871) 6 Burlington Gardens,
31 and 32
built for the University of London but now part Old Burlington Street
of the Royal Academy of Arts, originally it would
have directly faced Burlington House’s north
1718–23
front across the remainder of the gardens. As we Colen Campbell (1676–1729)
have seen, Burlington House’s south front was
heavily Palladianised by Campbell, but its mid-
seventeenth-century north front was curiously left
untouched and would have made rather an odd
contrast with Leoni’s more up-to-date design.

Visitor information
7 Burlington Gardens is now occupied by
Abercrombie & Fitch and is open daily.

Directions TO NEXT SITE

Continue west along Burlington Gardens.
Old Burlington Street is the first turning on the Photo © Royal Academy of Arts

right.

Photo © Royal Academy of Arts

Colen Campbell’s 31 and 32 Old Burlington Street,

begun while he was completing work on
Burlington House, are the only surviving houses
from the original street layout; they appear to have
been highly influential on subsequent townhouse
architecture. Of the two surviving, No. 31 is more
intact, but unfortunately currently covered in
scaffolding. No. 32 was altered in the early twentieth
century with the addition of the shop front and large
showrooms. As an example of the modular
character of this mode of townhouse architecture, step-pitched roof, which often included dormer-
No. 31 is one bay wider than the other houses, so windows, the prevalence of curved-top windows,
as to incorporate a staircase leading from its front large overhanging eaves and heavily decorated
hall. Its ground-floor rooms feature ceilings and doorcases. However, by the early eighteenth century
overmantels with carved male and female heads in this mode of building was becoming less common.
the style of William Kent, which probably date from Large overhanging eaves were forbidden ‘for the
the 1730s. better, preventing mischiefs that may happen by fire’
in the building act of 1707. But more than this, it was
The two houses were originally part of a larger
the renewed interest in Palladian ideas, especially
four-house development by Campbell, which
as interpreted by Jones (in his Vitruvius Britannicus it
incorporated the now destroyed 3–5 Burlington
was Jones who Campbell cast as the great architect of
Gardens. Interestingly, there is no emphasis on the
Augustan Rome reborn) that led to the superseding
party wall in their façades despite the fact that they
of the seventeenth-century townhouse type and the
would have originally appeared as a single building
return of the proportional windows that had failed to
with the distinctions between each house only
catch on nearly a century earlier.
indicated by the doorcases.
In his Critical Review of the Public Buildings,
Statues, and Ornaments, in and about London and Visitor information
Westminster of 1734, the journalist James Ralph
32 Old Burlington Street is currently occupied
(d. 1762) claimed that he ‘would recommend
by the tailors Anderson & Sheppard and is open
this row as a sample of the most perfect kind for
daily.
our modern architects to follow’. Despite Ralph’s
endorsement of Burlington’s architectural ideas
being a thinly veiled puff for his own career, the
Directions to next site
uniformity of Campbell’s work here appears Head north along Old Burlington Street until you
to have served as prototype for a great many reach Clifford Street on the left. Turn left down
eighteenth-century townhouses of which Flitcroft’s Clifford Street, heading west. Cross Old Bond
36 Sackville Street is a prime example. Other Street and continue west along Grafton Street.
features that were to become standard in such Continue along Grafton Street as it turns south.
houses were the console doorcases, the implied Take the first right heading west along Hay Hill. At
order and the simplified cornices, as we have seen. the end of Hay Hill cross Berkeley Street and walk
north onto Berkeley Square. 45 and 46 Berkeley
The idea of uniform terraced housing was not new. Square are on the west side of Berkeley Square.
In volume two of his Vitruvius Britannicus (1717)
– a kind of architectural ‘manifesto’ that attempted
to formulate and codify a distinctly British
architectural style – Campbell published a print
of Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden complex c. 1631
designed for the Earl of Bedford, which, in contrast
to the haphazard and often ramshackle state of
the then urban fabric, presented a uniform and
regular design for a residential square and terraced
housing clearly inspired by Italian examples. It was
an exposition of classical compositional principles
transposed to urban layout. However, despite its,
for London, stunning originality, Jones’s scheme
was not very influential. Instead, it was Dutch and
French models that had most impact on urban
architecture during the seventeenth century,
likely influenced by the newly reinstated royal
court bringing back architectural ideas from the
continent.
The seventeenth-century townhouse was
characterised by its windows being of uniform,

45 and 46
Berkeley Square
1744–50
Henry Flitcroft (1697–1769)
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts
45 and 46 Berkeley Square were both built to near
identical designs by Henry Flitcroft, and are rare
examples of stone fronts in the eighteenth-century
townhouse typology. Each house is comprised of four
bays with rusticated ground floor and door surrounds
and pedimented first-floor windows with balcony
balustrades. In plan, each had a two-bay front hall with
staircase behind and two large rooms to the side, but
the original interiors do not survive.
Before Sir Robert Smirke’s addition of an extra storey
to No. 45 in 1838–39, the two houses were exact
mirror opposites of one another. Such symmetry over
what was essentially more than one residence was
quite unusual. Berkeley Square was laid out c. 1738 on
some land in a bend of the Tyburn stream, and, like
Grosvenor Square (c. 1725), its larger contemporary
to the north, it was developed on a private or freehold
basis unlike the earlier St James’s Square built on
land leased from the crown. Plots were expensive and
usually bought individually meaning that there was
no guarantee that a single architect or architectural
scheme would be employed for a row of houses
along a street or square, though this did happen on
occasions such as Colen Campbell’s now-demolished
continuous palace-like façade for Grosvenor Square.
However, despite this often piecemeal design and
construction of townhouses, which was more or less
how houses had always been built in the city, the
regularity and uniformity of the eighteenth-century
townhouse typology – the use of similar materials,
proportional arrangement of windows and the lack of
emphasis on party walls – meant that there was often
a blurring of boundaries between buildings. Looking
at a long line of houses of this period, even if there
were some deviations between each residence, it
would be hard to ascertain exactly where each house
began and finished. Moreover, such houses were
occupied by, for the time, a broad spectrum of social
classes, from members of the middling classes, like
merchants, right up to the aristocracy. This apparent
continuity between the façades could be extrapolated
to represent a general blurring of class distinctions
between the inhabitants. And, in some ways, the
terrace-house type, largely peculiar to London, was a
reflection of an urban society that was arguably less
strictly hierarchical and more flexible than those of
many other European cities of the time.
In this context, where the design of the façade was,
essentially, governed by Palladian rules of proportion,
and could be read as representative of a more fluid
and less rigidly stratified social hierarchy, building in
a more expensive material like stone, rather than the
usual brick with stone dressing, could be used as a
way of making a house and its owner stand out from
others in the row. In this way, the stone façades and
ground-floor rustication of 45 and 46 Berkeley Square
were part of the builders’ strategies of display intended
to clearly differentiate the two houses from the others
on the row or in the square.
Visitor information
45 and 46 Berkeley Square are not open to the
public.
Directions to next site
44 Berkeley Square is the next house along.

44 Berkeley Square
1742–45
William Kent (1685–1748)
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts
Built 1742–44 to a design by William Kent for Lady
Isabella Finch, spinster daughter of the 7th Earl of
Winchilsea, 44 Berkeley Square is quite possibly
the best-preserved house of the period. In his early
career, Kent was, as we have seen, closely associated
with Lord Burlington, often acting as the proxy for
the aristocrat’s architectural ideas, though by the
time he came to build 44 Berkeley Square he was an
accomplished architect in his own right.
The building’s exterior is restrained both in design
and, in comparison to its stone neighbours, in
materials. The façade is a standard three levels with
basement and single dormer window in the roof.
It has the usual pedimented-topped windows and
string courses, and is built of brown brick with stone
dressings that pick out the ground floor quoining and
rusticated door surround. Despite the house’s siting in
the prime central spot of the square’s most select west
side, its quietly reserved exterior barely hints at the
dramatic and ingenious use of space inside.
The interior is constructed around a central staircase,
rectangular with semi-circular ends that form apses
in the turns. The first flight ascends away from the
entrance to a half-landing in one apse and then
returns in opposite direction in two arms towards a
screen of Ionic columns behind which lies the second
apse and stairs to the second floor.
The second-floor landing stands above the screen,
echoing its curvilinear shape and allowing circulation
between the front and back rooms. The stairwell is
lit from above – a similar solution to the one Kent
employed for the Egyptian Hall at Holkham Hall, the
large country house he built for Thomas Coke, Earl
of Leicester in 1734 – an innovative way of getting
around problems of lighting in a Georgian townhouse.
It is hard to accurately describe, but the result of this
complex manipulation of form within such a confined
space is nothing short of breathtaking and is certainly
one of the finest set-piece interiors of the period.
On the first floor the Saloon, the house’s principal
room, is lavishly decorated. The ceiling is richly
coffered and gilded; inset in it are paintings of the
Loves of the Gods, which are possibly by Kent himself
though he had died before the room’s completion.
Interestingly, the room extends above the normal
ceiling level to half fill the blind second-floor windows.
This was quite a rarity. As we have seen, space was
usually very tight in such townhouses and it would
have been wasteful to devote space to one oversized
single room where two or three rooms could have
comfortably sat. A clue behind this design decision
lies in the fact, noted above, that Lady Isabella Finch,
for whom Kent designed the house, was a spinster
who was free to give over most of the space for
entertaining and display. It was not only the Saloon’s
rich decoration that signified the owner’s ostentation
of wealth, but its very proportion and scale. One might
even attribute this interest in correctly proportioned
rooms to the fact that, as space was expensive, having
a room a particular proportion, whose shape, such as
the archetypal Palladian cube, often reinforced by the
decorative plasterwork, could suggest high status and
prestige in a way that ever more lavish (and expensive)
decoration could not.
Visitor information
44 Berkeley Square is the home of a private
members’ club and is rarely open to the public.
Directions to next site
Continue north along the west side of Berkeley
Square. As you leave the square head up Davies
Street. 2 Davies Street is at the intersection with
Bourdon Street.

2 Davies Street
(Bourdon House)
1721–23
Architect unknown
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts
Despite being subject to later extensions, 2 Davies
Street, named Bourdon House after its original lessee
in the mid-nineteenth century, is a particularly rare
survival of a detached townhouse, in contrast to the
terraced houses we have encountered so far.
Bourdon is thought to be Lieutenant William Bourdon
who, having been commissioned into a footguard
regiment in 1708, was by 1772 drawing half pay and
had become a Vestryman of the new parish of St
George’s Hanover Square in which Bourdon House
is situated. The house was originally erected under a
sub-lease from estate surveyor Thomas Barlow. No
architect is documented as having worked on the
design, nor is it known whether Barlow, a carpenter by
trade, was himself involved in the design – this would
not have been unusual.
The five-bay front with the slightly projecting central
three bays facing south towards the enclosed garden
was the principal front of the old house, which
originally was only two bays deep. Enlargements to the
north and west of the house were made soon after it
was built while the large extension to the southwest
is a sympathetically styled twentieth-century addition.
The earliest-known engraving of the house shows the
south front to have been topped by two oval dormers
(the attic storey with three dormers above is a later
addition). Their oval shape and the heavy garden gate
appear more Baroque – the gate specifically recalling
the architecture of Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726)
– than Palladian.
The house’s mixture of Palladian arrangement with
elements of the Baroque indicates that the clear
distinction between the two styles, which is so often
assumed, was not always adhered to. One could
read the grandiosity and extravagance of the English
Baroque, perhaps most apparent in the work of
Vanbrugh or Thomas Archer (c. 1668–1743), as a
reaction to the permeation of classical architecture
down the social ranks and its resultant debasement as
a signifier of status – a position it had held when first
imported into England most notably by Inigo Jones
in the early seventeenth century. The logical response
to this situation was to develop even more lavish and
complicated forms of classicism, but there was a limit
and, to quote the historian Peter Borsay, ‘to elaborate
on the reigning baroque style would have risked
entering into the aesthetically ridiculous’.
In this context, Palladianism’s refusal of the dramatic
forms and intricate ornamentation of the Baroque
can be seen as a way for the social elite to take back
cultural authority from the forces of the market.
Elaborate and ostentatious decoration was now seen
as signifying vulgarity and lack of cultivation in stark
contrast to the reigning Palladian taste for simplicity.
Neatly summarising this view, one of Burlington’s
protégés, Isaac Ware (1704–1766), stated ‘there is a
nobleness in simplicity which is always broke upon
by ornament’. But this notion of simplicity as well as
Palladian discourse in general was hard to pin down.
For example, in his A Complete Body of Architecture,
Ware’s Palladian treatise of 1768, he constantly
referred to notions of harmony, beauty, nobility, grace
and elegance, all abstract concepts to which only those
of intellect and refined sensibility – the aristocracy
– had access.
In theory, therefore, the dramatic illusions of the
Baroque and Palladianism’s simple nobility were
supposedly mutually exclusive, but buildings such
as Bourdon House reveal that in practice this was
not always the case, at least in the 1720s. During
the 1730s and ’40s Palladianism would filter down
the social ladder through the proliferation of pattern
books and builders’ guides – entrepreneurial
publishers recognised a clear demand for access
to this socially elevated form of architecture. Yet it
would seem that even at the time Bourdon House
was built – quite possibly by an amateur architect
for a man of some, though by no means the highest,
66 Brook Street
c.1723–25
distinction – Palladianism, like the Baroque, the
previous architecture of prestige, had already begun to
Edward Shepherd (c. 1692–1747)
be emulated in places other than the architectural and
social elite.

Visitor information
Bourdon House is now occupied by a branch of
Alfred Dunhill and is open daily.

Directions to next site

Head north along Davies Street. Cross Grosvenor
Street and continue heading north along Davies
Street until you reach Brook Street on the left. 66
Brook Street is on the intersection of Davies Street
and Brook Street.

Photo © Royal Academy of Arts

Described by Pevsner as some of the ‘very best

early Georgian work in Mayfair’, 66 Brook Street has
the mixture of Baroque and Palladian architectural
elements that was quite common to Edward
Shepherd’s work elsewhere in the area. Shepherd
was one of the most successful speculative builder/
architects of the time and quite heavily associated
with Sir Richard Grosvenor’s development at
Grosvenor Square c. 1725–31 to which Brook Street
leads. Shepherd was involved in the design and
construction of a range of houses for the square’s
north side (Campbell might also have had a hand
in the scheme), which, as the square was accessed
from the corners rather than centrally like St James’s
Square, extended nearly the entire length of Mayfair’s
largest square. Shepherd also built extensively in the 76 Brook Street
surrounding area and No. 66 is just one of the seven 1725–26
houses he built on Brook Street alone.
Colen Campbell (1676–1729)
Its façade contains a mixture of Baroque and
Palladian features. If one disregards the early-
twentieth-century top storey, the window
proportioning is more or less Palladian; but the
horizontal banding of the ground floor that is used
to emphasise the party wall is – in contrast, as we
have seen, to more strictly Palladian houses of the
time – a fairly typical Baroque decoration. Moreover,
like Bourdon house, it is constructed of red brick,
the typical material of the seventeenth- and early-
eighteenth-century townhouse, but which had
begun to be superseded in Palladian townhouse
construction by paler grey or yellow stocks.
Shepherd was originally a plasterer by trade and
elaborate plasterwork was often a feature of his
houses. The house’s first-floor Saloon is sumptuously
decorated with all manner of architectural and
figurative ornament. Despite this however, as was
typical, it is by no means a large room, reinforcing the
sheer grandeur of Kent’s near double-height Saloon at
44 Berkeley Square.

Visitor information
66 Brook Street is not open to the public.

Directions to next site

Continue along Brook Street heading west.
No. 76 is a short way up on the same side.

Photo © Royal Academy of Arts

One of two houses Campbell built on Brook Street,
the other now destroyed, No. 76 was his own 60–61 Green Street
residence. Externally it is largely intact apart from the
addition of the top storey in 1871–72. The house’s
façade is only two bays wide, which limits the
(Hampden House)
c. 1730
opportunities for a typically Palladian façade. Though
in comparison to, for example, Edward Shepherd’s
Roger Morris (1695–1749)
contemporaneous No. 66, Campbell’s house is clearly
from the Palladian school of architecture. Moreover, it
is unimaginable that Campbell would have not had in
mind Palladio’s Palazzo Porto, an incomplete two-bay
wide addition to an older house, in Piazza Castello,
Vicenza, even though it was too late to be included
in the Quattro Libri. It is an example of a quite literal
architectural borrowing, common in Palladian
country-house architecture, but rare in the town.

Visitor information
76 Brook Street is not open to the public.

Directions to next site

Head west along Brook Street and continue
along the north side of Grosvenor Square. When
you arrive at its north-west corner turn right
and head north up North Audley Street until
you reach Green Street on the left. 60–61 Green
Street is a short way along on the left.

Photo © Royal Academy of Arts

The left part of the house (what was No. 60),

which originally consisted of a three-bay central
section with two-bay wings set back, was built
as his own house by the architect Roger Morris
around 1730 when the street was first laid out.
Morris started his career as a bricklayer, and early
on occasionally acted as Campbell’s assistant,
which helped him attract patrons, allowing him to
begin an architectural career in his own right. He
is best known for his country-house architecture of
which Marble Hill in Twickenham, built 1724–29
for Henrietta Howard, mistress of George II, is the
finest example.
The development of Green Street only started
around 1727 and due to a general slump in building
in the 1730s and ’40s was not completed until
much later in the century. Space was clearly less
of an issue than it was elsewhere in Mayfair, and this
allowed Morris to transpose elements from country-
house architecture, such as its projecting wings
and general openness, to the city context. But as
the building industry quickly picked up, this did not
become a model that could easily be reproduced, and
it was in any case probably more of a personal project
for Morris rather than an attempt at creating a new
townhouse prototype.
As an architect living in fashionable Mayfair, Morris
was far from unique. As we have seen, Campbell also
had a house nearby and other houses on Morris’s
own Green Street were also occupied by members of
the building trade. Interestingly, while Morris started
his career as a bricklayer, when he moved into his new
house on Green Street he was described by the rate
collector as a ‘gentleman’. It would seem that, for an
architect, being seen to build a house for oneself in a
wealthy and fashionable area, even one they had had a
hand in developing, could elevate their social standing.
Moreover, living amongst and operating within the
same social circles of many potential patrons could
help with acquiring further commissions.

Visitor information
60–61 Green Street is not open to the public.
 Further reading
Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance:
Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991
Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 6:
Westminster, London: Yale University Press, 2003
Andrew Byrne, London’s Georgian Houses, London:
The Georgian Press, 1986
Matthew Craske, ‘From Burlington Gate to
Billingsgate: James Ralph’s attempt to impose
Burlingtonian classicism as a canon of public taste’,
in Barbara Arciszewska and Elizabeth McKellar, eds,
Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to
Eighteenth-Century Architecture, Aldershot: Ashgate,
2004
Elizabeth McKellar, The Birth of Modern London:
The Development and Design of the City, 1660–1720,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999
Sir John Summerson, Georgian London, London:
Barrie & Jenkins, 1988
Devised and written by Owen Hopkins
Royal Academy of Arts Architecture Programme
© Royal Academy of Arts, 2009
Glossary
Balustrade: A row of balusters supporting a coping or
rail often used on a terrace or on the lower half of tall
windows.
Column: A detached vertical structural form, usually
slender and circular. In classical architecture a column
usually consists of a base, shaft and capital.
Dormer window: A window protruding from the plane
of a pitched roof.
Doorcase: A frame lining a door often consisting of
columns, pilaster and a pediment.
Hipped roof: A type of roof in which all sides are
sloped downwards to the tops of the walls.
Orders: Central to classical architecture, the orders
constitute the various modes of articulating columns.
They are distinguished by their proportions,
characteristic profiles and ornamentation. There are
usually considered to be five distinct orders: Tuscan
(solid and very plain with wide spacings between
columns), Doric (round capitals, with fluted columns
often with no base), Ionic (fluted columns with two
opposed volutes in the capital), Corinthian (decorated
with acanthus leaves and four scrolls), and Composite
(combines the volutes of the Ionic with the acanthus
leaves of the Corinthian order).
Pediment: A triangular or segmental form on the front
of a building or portico creating the peak of a roof.
They are often used to top windows and doors.
Piano nobile: The principal storey of a classical
building, usually the first floor, and identified by its
having the tallest windows in a façade.
Pilaster: A square or rectangular projection from a
wall that is designed to resemble a column.
Portico: A colonnaded structure usually extending
from the entrance of a building.
Quoins: The corner stones of a wall often emphasised
and articulated in different material to the rest of the
wall.
Venetian window: Also known as a Palladian window
or Serliana, it consists of a central round-headed
opening flanked by two flat-topped lower openings.