John Nash

John Nash laid out the ceremonial route through central London and largely invented the Regency style. Born in London in 1752 to a Welsh millwright, he trained under Robert Taylor, set up as a speculative builder, went bankrupt in 1783, and retreated to Wales for a decade designing county gaols and country houses. He returned in the 1790s in partnership with the landscape gardener Humphry Repton, which brought him clients and an approach: buildings conceived as elements in a designed landscape rather than as isolated objects. He worked in whatever style the setting suggested — Italianate villas, Gothic castles, thatched cottages ornés at Blaise Hamlet — and used stucco over brick extensively, which was cheap, fast and looked like stone until it weathered. The Prince Regent's patronage from about 1806 gave him the largest urban commission in British history. He planned Regent's Park with terraces facing it and villas inside, and drove Regent Street south from it to Carlton House, deliberately routed to separate the aristocratic streets of Mayfair from Soho. The scheme created Portland Place, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square's shape and the line of Regent Street as they stand. He remodelled Brighton Pavilion into an Indian-domed fantasy with Chinese interiors, and rebuilt Buckingham House into Buckingham Palace. The palace ruined him. Costs ran far beyond estimates, and when George IV died in 1830 Nash lost his protector; a parliamentary inquiry criticised him, he was dismissed, and no further public work came. He died at his house on the Isle of Wight in 1835.

• Lived: 1752 CE – 1835 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: architect