From the ground up
A canny eye for construction brought wealth and success to Georgian developer James Burton, yet he still found time to help shore up the country’s defences, as Carla Passino discovers
IT takes pluck and vision to build a large swathe of London almost singlehandedly. Developer James Burton had both and the figures of what he accomplished remain dizzying even 300 years later. In the 38 years between 1785 and 1823, he built (or supervised the building of) 2,366 townhouses, rising to riches and success from relatively modest origins.
Born James Haliburton in London in 1761, he was the son of a developer of Scottish origins and it was in Southwark that he began his career in 1785. Blackfriars Bridge had joined the two banks of the Thames in 1769 and this offered an opportunity for speculative development in south London that Burton seized with gusto, first in his native neighbourhood, then in Clapham Common. Soon, however, the sirens of Bloomsbury lured him across the river, where the New Road linking Paddington to Islington (today’s Marylebone, Euston and Pentonville Roads) had opened up tantalising prospects.
Burton first trained his eye on the Foundling Hospital’s estate (loosely the area centred on Brunswick Square and Mecklenburgh Square, WC1), where he became the leading developer, building 586 townhouses between 1792 and 1802. He did very well for himself, but also for the Foundling Hospital, which previously had been rich in land and short of cash: ‘Without such a man, possessed of very considerable talents, unwearied industry, and a capital of his own, the extraordinary success of the improvement of the Foundling Estate could not have taken place,’ wrote architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell in an 1807 report to the hospital’s governors, noting that Burton had invested in the project an astounding £400,000 (more than £49 million in today’s money). Despite this, the developer came under attack for the quality of his work. The criticism was probably compounded by the fact that there had originally been strong opposition to the hospital’s building spree partly on the (not entirely unjustified) grounds that the foundlings needed green space and partly because the new properties would block the views of residents in Great Ormond Street and Queen’s Square—an early example of nimbyism.
However, this ‘unjust clamour’, as Cockerell called it in his report, didn’t seem to deter other Bloomsbury landowners and, soon, Burton began building houses on several local estates, including the Duke of Bedford’s. This allowed him to give the area a degree of coherence and shared infrastructure, although, initially at least, the Duke vetoed new roads north of Bedford House, because he wanted to preserve his own views. Somehow, the canny developer managed to persuade His Grace to let him build two, on either side of Bedford House’s gardens, then proceeded to pepper the open fields with constructions after the Duke moved out in 1800. One of the resulting landmarks was Russell Square, its understated houses (some of which still survive) cocooning the Humphry-repton landscaped gardens. Burton appeared to have a very good grasp of his developments’ prospective residents, as Dana Arnold notes in Rural Urbanism: London Landscapes in the Early Nineteenth
Century: parts of Bloomsbury appealed to the upper middle class, but elsewhere—notably on land too far east to draw London’s great and good—he built mostly third- and fourth-rate houses intended for clerks and artisans respectively. Not that this detracted from the area’s overall look, considering that the theoretically less desirable Skinners estate included the delightful Cartwright Gardens, where a curve of graceful houses hugs the greenery to create one of London’s most peaceful corners; originally Burton Crescent, the street was renamed in 1908 after parliamentary
Without such a man, the improvement of the Foundling Estate could not have taken place
reform campaigner Maj John Cartwright, who lived there from 1819 until his death in 1824.
Despite having trained as an architect, Burton’s interest lay in the business of building and he preferred to let other people worry about design—one for all, John Nash, with whom he developed Regent’s Park. It had been a cash-strapped Nash who had first turned to Burton to complete his vision for Regent Street (‘The fickle finger of fate’, August 2, 2023), with the developer then going on to fund the construction of a series of houses on Regent’s Park. One of the properties was his own villa, The Holme, designed by his youngest son, then only 18, who would later become an architect of note: Decimus Burton.
Not that the partnership with Nash always worked well: the Buckingham Palace architect disliked how Burton had built Chester Terrace —a sweep of 42 townhouses with more than 918ft of unbroken façade trimmed with Corinthian porticos—so much that he tried to have it rebuilt. At least some of Nash’s contemporaries shared his misgivings (albeit attributing to him both merits and demerits of the street’s look). A Picturesque Guide to the Regent’s Park, published in 1829 for John Limbird, deemed Chester Terrace ‘grand and commanding’, with the composition exhibiting ‘great genius and powerful conception’, but added that ‘defective details’ somewhat spoiled the look —the capitals of its columns wanted ‘the gracefulness of the Corinthian’, the volutes were ‘puny illustrations of that beautiful order’ and the form and proportions of its balustrade were ‘starved and lanky’.
If Burton were ever offended by this criticism, he must have consoled himself by looking at his accounts: the houses he built at Regent’s Park between 1812 and 1823 had a combined worth of £317,100 (more than £31 million) according to his contemporary, Bloomsbury resident and historian Rowland Dobie, and, overall, the properties he built between 1785 and 1823 had an estimated value of £1,848,900 (about £182 million in today’s money). That said, speculative development was a risky business and Burton made and lost fortunes: his wealth when he died in 1837 was £60,000 (about £5.5 million today—not quite in Elon Musk’s league, although still comfortably off).
According to antiquary John Britton, both his development of the Skinners estate in Bloomsbury and, outside London, of a seaside resort near Hastings in East Sussex, St Leonardson-sea, had proved financially crippling. He may have lost money on it, but Burton had the satisfaction of seeing St Leonards become popular with the pinnacle of British Society: the Duchess of Kent and the future Queen Victoria spent time there in the winter of 1834.
Building houses, however, wasn’t Burton’s only venture. He had at one time owned stakes in a distillery and, from 1811, invested in gunpowder-making—his mills were in Kent, where he had bought a house, Mabledon Park, near Tonbridge, in 1804 and where he became county sheriff in 1810. When doing all this, the developer—concerned about his country’s defence at the time of the Napoleonic Wars—also raised, funded and headed, as colonel, a volunteer corps, The Loyal British Artificers. These, explained Dobie in The History of the United Parishes of St Giles in the Fields and St George Bloomsbury, ‘consisted of a phalanx of upwards of 1,000, of which I became one, anxious, like them, to march in an attitude of resistance to the enemy, with Colonel Burton at our head’.
Although many, not least Britton, painted Burton as a jerry-builder, Dobie couldn’t heap enough praise on him and not only for his volunteer-army efforts: ‘Let it be remembered that [the development of Bloomsbury]... was begun and finished during a long disastrous war, most unfavourable to such an undertaking, yet he sternly persevered,’ he wrote. ‘The fields where robberies and murders had been committed, the scene of depravity and wickedness the most hideous for centuries, became, chiefly under his auspices, rapidly metamorphosed into splendid squares and spacious streets; receptacles of civil life and polished society.’ If Burton enriched himself in the process, concluded Dobie, ‘he well deserved it’.
It was a risky business and Burton made and lost fortunes