Hinterland

William Wilkins reinvented architecture in the Regency. So why have you never heard of him?

William Wilkins is more in your consciousness than you know. The front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square was his design, typical of the classical idiom that, by the 1830s, he had made his own. Londoners will also know him, whether they realise it or not, from the equally classical grandeur of St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, now the Lanesborough Hotel. Another of his betterknown works is Grange Park in Hampshire, which he remodelled in 1809-10 as a Greek temple, and is now a popular opera venue.

Wilkins also built New Court at my alma mater, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a superb job he made of it. Corpus has the oldest continually inhabited court at Cambridge, its Old Court having been built in 1352 to commemorate victims of the Black Death. Wilkins’s court joins the medieval one perfectly without overshadowing or eclipsing it.

He was born in Norwich in 1778, and went to school there, but Cambridge was woven through his life. His father was an architect, interested in the classical style; and after Wilkins Sr had repaired the Master’s Lodge at Gonville and Caius, Wilkins Jr became an undergraduate there. He distinguished himself as a mathematician, but was already making architectural drawings, completing his first set of designs – for Earl Manvers’s seat in Nottinghamshire – in 1799, at the precocious age of 21.

But before he made his name as an architect, he made one as a scholar and antiquary, touring the Mediterranean and sketching Greek temples. Wilkins brought his learning back to England and won, aged just 27, a competition to build the newly founded Downing College, Cambridge (though the money ran out and two ranges of the planned four had to be abandoned). His pioneering classicism was based on Greek buildings, rather than the later Roman designs that had been handed down from Vitruvius to Palladio, and had been popular in Britain from Inigo Jones onwards.

Wilkins’s espousal of the grand style won him aristocratic patrons – notably the 4th Earl of Rosebery, for whom he built the Gothic revival Dalmeny House from 1814-17 – and he slipped between the increasingly fashionable

Gothic and the Classical over the ensuing two decades. He added Greek friezes and details to existing houses, rather too many of which – such as the staircase at the United Universities Club – were demolished in a more uncouth age.

In the 1820s, he had three substantial projects in Cambridge – at Trinity and in the front court at King’s. But his work at Corpus is the most substantial, because it is a much smaller college and Wilkins utterly transformed it. As part of New Court, he added a gatehouse, and a new chapel. The prospect from within the court is one of Cambridge’s finest sights, with a handsome master’s lodge, a two-storey library and a new hall with, as at King’s, a fine Gothic revival roof. The undergraduate rooms in the court are spacious,

He brought scholarly rigour to classicism, sketching the temples of ancient Greece

though college legend has it that when Wilkins asked the thenmaster how many bathrooms he would like, the master replied that none was necessary, since if a gentleman had a bath in the vacations that would do him until he returned home again.

Having left his mark on Cambridge, in the late 1820s Wilkins – by then an RA – built St George’s Hospital, and the classical main building for University College London, in Gower Street. He had campaigned for a national gallery, and he was asked to build one. However, the government kept the purse strings tight and made Wilkins salvage columns from the demolished Carlton House, and he was unable to build on the scale that he wished. Generations of architectural critics have attacked the south front of the National Gallery for being too small and inconsiderable; and in 1838 Wilkins went back to Cambridge, where he had lived since 1811, somewhat disappointed.

He had submitted plans for new Houses of Parliament – the old ones having burned down in 1834 – and for the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, but lost out on both. In any case, he would not have lived to see them, as he died on his 61st birthday of kidney disease. It is now time to give him the posthumous recognition an architect of his stature deserves.