Architect and town planner. He was born in Lambeth, the son of a Welsh millwright. He trained as an architect under Sir Robert Taylor, but after suffering some professional setbacks, left London for Wales. Financial problems forced him back into architecture, and he succeeded in establishing a successful country house practice in collaboration with the picturesque garden designer Humphrey Repton. Nash’s style, although basically neoclassical, incorporated romantic gothic, Italianate and vernacular elements. After his return to London around 1800, he attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales, and it was partially royal favour which enabled him in 1811 to win a competition for the layout of the park, which subsequently became known as Regent’s Park. He went on to produce a masterplan for the centre of the West End, principally the main north-south axis between Regent’s Park and the Mall. This was carried out subject to a number of modifications between 1818 and Nash’s death in 1835. Some of its principal features, such as Park Crescent and Waterloo Place still stand, though all of Regent’s Street was rebuilt in the early twentieth century in eclectic and academic classical styles. Nash also remodelled Brighton Pavilion for the Prince Regent as an oriental fantasy, and, when the Prince became George IV, he began the transformation of Buckingham House into Buckingham Palace. However, after the king’s death in 1830, drastic cutbacks were made to Nash’s plan for the palace. The grand gateway that Nash had designed for the palace in 1825 was finally erected in 1837 with a programme of sculptural decoration much simplified under the direction of his architect successor at the palace, Edward Blore; in 1851, the Marble Arch, as it had become known, was relocated to Cumberland Gate.
Bibliography: H. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840, 3rd edn, New Haven and London, 1995; G. Tyack, ‘Nash, John (1752–1835)’, ODNB (online edn), (2004), 2009; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xix, xxiv, xxv, 142, 143, 163–66, 236–37, 243, 269, 293, 294, 387.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011