CLASSICAL AND PALLADIAN

Some early Georgian mansions (like Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire) continued to adopt the monumental Baroque style popularised in the late Stuart period. But soon purer architectural imitations of Classical Roman and Greek originals – as filtered through the designs of 16th-century Venetian architect Andrea Palladio and the Scottish architect Colen Campbell’s seminal Vitruvius Britannicus (1715–25) – carried all before them.

Ultra-fashionable villas on the fringes of Georgian London led the way. Compact Marble Hill House (begun in 1724) became the model not only for many English mansions but also for plantation houses in the American colonies.

Domed and colonnaded Chiswick House, designed by the architect Earl of Burlington in 1729, is much more purely Palladian – a Roman-style temple for the art collections it was built to display.

CHANGING FASHIONS

Chiswick’s sumptuous interiors are by William Kent. Those of Kenwood House, Lord Mansfield’s Hampstead villa (1764–79 and later), were created by the still more famous Robert Adam. Both make extensive use of bright colours – Georgian interior design was not all pastel shades and chaste simplicity.

There was in fact no single Georgian interior style. Earlier Classicism gave way, by the 1760s, to ‘Frenchified and effeminate’ Rococo, or Chinoiserie, or both combined. House owners who dared to be different might choose the mock-medieval Gothick pioneered at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (1747), or ‘Egyptian’ or ‘Grecian’ modes.

By the early 19th century, austere Classicism no longer prevailed. A great array of styles was in evidence, from the severely simple Greek Revival exemplified by Belsay Hall, Northumberland, and The Grange at Northington, Hampshire, to the Indian-Chinese-Egyptian Brighton Pavilion, designed by the Prince Regent’s favourite architect, John Nash.

TOWNS AND TERRACES

The most astonishingly grandiose surviving interiors of the period are those of Apsley House, a Robert Adam creation remodelled on an imperial scale for the Duke of Wellington between 1819 and 1830.

Apsley is also the last unaltered survivor of the great London town houses, indispensable to any Georgian family with pretensions to power or social leadership. From 1811, those of lesser means could choose instead a house in one of the new, palatial-looking Regent’s Park terraces – in fact ordinary brick dwellings behind showy stuccoed façades – designed by Nash.

From Wakefield to Weymouth, terraces and squares of more modest but delightful town houses are among the Georgian period’s most important architectural legacies.

Many of the same towns also retain imposing public buildings of the period, which reflected growing commercial success and civic pride. Town halls, theatres, concert halls, exchanges and shopping emporia sprung up, and fashionable spas and resorts like Bath and Brighton flourished.

CHURCHES OR TEMPLES?

Gothic Revivalist Victorians regarded Classical Georgian churches as too reminiscent of paganism. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s massive and individualistic Christ Church, Spitalfields (1716–31), does indeed recall Imperial Rome, while James Gibbs’s St Martin-in-the Fields (1722–6) could be a Greek temple, but for its spire.

More typical of the period, though, are remote country churches like Hannah-cum-Hagnaby in Lincolnshire, or the charming St Mary’s near Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire, jam-packed with box pews and galleries and dominated by its towering pulpit.

Such ‘prayer-book’ churches – rare survivors of Victorian church restoration – were designed for congregational worship, shifting the focus away from the altar. They bear a close resemblance to English Heritage’s only Nonconformist place of worship, Goodshaw Chapel, Lancashire (1760–1809).