Photograph: courtesy of Yale University Press

the town house in georgian london
rachel stewart

Yale: Yale University Press, 2009, 272 pp., 20 colour and 60 b/w ill., $ 65
ISBN 978-0-300-15277-7

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Studies of the eighteenth-century town house are few and far between in contrast to the vast literature on the country house in this period. I still recall with irritation contributing to a useful British conference on the topic which remains unpublished, a fate it does not share with the many symposia on the country house. The reasons for this imbalance are manifold, not least the bespoke nature of the country house as opposed to the commercial character of urban domestic architecture. Convention simply does not thrill, and architectural history of the past century has been principally concerned with buildings that stimulate aesthetic delight. Pioneers in the examination of urban domestic form include James Ayres, Neil Burton, Dan Cruikshank, Mark Girouard, Peter Guillery, Frank Kelsall, Elizabeth McKellar, and Sir John Summerson. The literature, though compact, is diverse in character. It includes general linear discussion of urban form, typological analysis of plan and detail, integration of social and architectural history, exploration of the economic drivers to speculative development, and close examination of specific buildings and urban contexts.

In focusing on clients’ wants and needs and considering a group of bespoke town houses, Rachel Stewart’s The Town House in Georgian London endeavours to straddle several of these categories. A stated aim is to redress the balance of interest from the country house to the town house and to view the latter in a holistic way, focusing on the client or occupant. This ‘is not architectural history with a nod to social history.’ Rather, the book delivers what it promises, and the strength of the volume lies in its fresh coverage of town house inhabitants, while its discussion of town house design is less original and more reliant on published sources. Though the book certainly adds useful information to our knowledge of the eighteenth-century London town house, the title is somewhat misleading in suggesting a comprehensive coverage of the topic over the entire century. In fact, as the introduction makes clear, attention is focused on the West End in the period 1766–90. The product of a doctoral thesis, the book combines fresh and original documentation with material that derives from literature review both of recent and eighteenth-century sources.

In the three initial chapters, which constitute Part One of the volume, Stewart gathers together a diverse range of documentation on the acquisition, ownership, and usage of the West End town house.  The particular financial status of the London house, realisable as an asset or dowry, is contrasted with the very different role of the country house as the key element in an unbroken patrimony. The multiple reasons for owning or renting a city house are vividly portrayed and effective use is made of quotation from correspondence, diaries, and contemporary literature. One of the less trumpeted attractions of having a city pied à terre is nicely captured in General Mostyn’s quip of 1776 to the Duke of Newcastle: ‘Tired of worsted…I took a run to London last Saturday to fuck somebody in silk.’ At times the author is apologetic for working on the ‘scale of the individual actor’ rather than taking a global approach, but it is in the particular that she most effectively evokes the patterns of ownership, consumption, evaluation, and emulation which characterised life in London’s late eighteenth-century streets and squares.

Part Two of the book is less convincing. It deals in two chapters with the largely negative portrayal of the town house in contemporary architectural literature and its limited graphic representation in plans and elevations. A final chapter focuses on the achievements of the Adam brothers in raising a conventional and limited domestic form to the status of architecture, drawing significantly upon existing Adam scholarship.
There is a certain contradiction in juxtaposing critical comment of the summary and conventional character of speculative building with demonstration of architectural ingenuity in bespoke town house design. Here one senses a thesis being translated too readily to book form. Town houses designed by William Kent, William Chambers, and Robert Adam are surely in an entirely different category to the run-of-the-mill, off-the-peg row houses which seemed to satisfy the needs of the majority, despite their critical reception by architects and cognoscenti.

To focus so much attention on negative perceptions of the standard house form and to conclude the book with discussion of the exceptional house points up a tension that runs through the book. The author wishes to redress the balance of historical interest from the country house to the town house and does so admirably in her discussion of town house occupants. It is, however, a very tall order to redress the balance of formal architectural interest from the vast wealth of eighteenth-century British country house design to a limited number of custom-built city mansions that are but oases of sophistication within a desert of speculative brick boxes. It is the cumulative effect of those boxes, the range and ingenuity of their internal planning and ornament, the fascinating development histories that drove their production and acquisition, and the lives lived within them that sustains growing interest in the urban domestic form. The strength of Stewart’s book lies in the very valuable new documentation that she presents, which offers fresh insight into the lives of town house dwellers in the late eighteenth century.

Christine Casey
Trinity College Dublin