Regent Street

When King George III was declared mad, his antithetically fashionable son became the Prince Regent, ruling in his father's place. The prince greatly admired Napoleon's urban interventions in Paris, so one of his first acts was to hire the architect John Nash to create a new, formal processional way from Pall Mall to a new park, called Regent's Park.

The southern end of the Regent's street was a broad axis terminating at Carlton House, the Prince Regent's residence between Pall Mall and the Mall, the royal ceremonial route between the Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace. The northern end of the new street was Regent's Park, a new park in the middle of boggy, mainly undeveloped land belonging to the Prince Regent in Marylebone, which Regent Street opened for development.

Nash used some existing streets and primarily kept within the street grids that floated at different angles between the new park and Pall Mall. That meant that the street had to shift to the east before it got to Pall Mall. The result was the beautiful curve of lower Regent Street, an unusual urban space.

The curve ends at Piccadilly Circus, Nash's circle which also terminates the axis to the Mall and marks the beginning of Shaftsbury Avenue, Coventry Street and Piccadilly Street (originally Portuguese Road). For many years, Piccadilly Circus functioned like Times Square in New York, although the government has pushed much of that use over to Leicester Square, which is now traffic-free.

In 1829 Carlton House was torn down, opening the vista down the hill to the Mall from Piccadilly Circus. The lower end of the street was renamed Waterloo Place, and a monument to the Duke of York was erected at the top of the new steps going down on axis to the Mall.

London would be a very different place without Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street and Regent's Park. Paris would not be Paris if it only had the medieval streets of old Paris, without the grand urban interventions of Louis XVI, Napoleon and Napoleon III with Baron Haussmann.

Click on the image to see it at a larger scale. The center view is from a vintage postcard taken while Regent Street was in the middle of a cleaning.

There's an urban myth that Napoleon's and Napoleon III's grand boulevards were designed to ease troop movement and open axes which could be controlled with cannon shot. In the list of priorities, these were perhaps numbers 9 and 10 on the list. Number 1 was social reform: opening up transportation around the city, clearing some of the worst housing, bringing a sewage system to the city and providing a modern beauty representing social progress.

Siefgried Giedion and Le Corbusier, two of the most important theorists and polemicists of Modernism, recognized the social program and admired it: they also wanted to reform the world. The scale of these works also fit with the abstract, aesthetic scale of Modernism and the scale Modernists hoped to work at in their public works.

Urban renewal became an essential part of Modernism's agenda. On the whole, the urban renewal was a failure (Jane Jacobs called it "urban removal"), and it led to a backlash against large scale urban interventions.

This is throwing out the baby with the bath water. All of our greatest cities — Paris, Rome, Berlin . . . New York, Chicago, Washington . . . Munich, Nancy, Venice and Florence — would not be the places they are today without these large, retro-fitted interventions. And there is no American city which would not benefit today from better urban design. Many of the urban messes created in the last 50 years can only be corrected by large-scale interventions.