Georgian architecture
Georgian architecture is the name given in most English-speaking countries to the set of architectural styles current between 1714 and 1830. It is eponymous for the first four British monarchs of the House of Hanover—George I, George II, George III, George IV—who reigned in continuous succession from August 1714 to June 1830; the style was revived in the late 19th century in the United States as Colonial Revival architecture and in the early 20th century in Great Britain as Neo-Georgian architecture. In the United States the term "Georgian" is used to describe all buildings from the period, regardless of style; the Georgian style is variable, but marked by symmetry and proportion based on the classical architecture of Greece and Rome, as revived in Renaissance architecture. Ornament is normally in the classical tradition, but restrained, sometimes completely absent on the exterior; the period brought the vocabulary of classical architecture to smaller and more modest buildings than had been the case before, replacing English vernacular architecture for all new middle-class homes and public buildings by the end of the period.
Georgian architecture is characterized by its balance. Regularity, as with ashlar stonework, was approved, imbuing symmetry and adherence to classical rules: the lack of symmetry, where Georgian additions were added to earlier structures remaining visible, was felt as a flaw, at least before Nash began to introduce it in a variety of styles. Regularity of housefronts along a street was a desirable feature of Georgian town planning; until the start of the Gothic Revival in the early 19th century, Georgian designs lay within the Classical orders of architecture and employed a decorative vocabulary derived from ancient Rome or Greece. In towns, which expanded during the period, landowners turned into property developers, rows of identical terraced houses became the norm; the wealthy were persuaded to live in these in town if provided with a square of garden in front of the house. There was an enormous amount of building in the period, all over the English-speaking world, the standards of construction were high.
Where they have not been demolished, large numbers of Georgian buildings have survived two centuries or more, they still form large parts of the core of cities such as London, Dublin, Newcastle upon Tyne and Bristol. The period saw the growth of a trained architectural profession; this contrasted with earlier styles, which were disseminated among craftsmen through the direct experience of the apprenticeship system. But most buildings were still designed by builders and landlords together, the wide spread of Georgian architecture, the Georgian styles of design more came from dissemination through pattern books and inexpensive suites of engravings. Authors such as the prolific William Halfpenny had editions in America as well as Britain. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the commonality of housing designs in Canada and the United States from the 19th century down to the 1950s, using pattern books drawn up by professional architects that were distributed by lumber companies and hardware stores to contractors and homebuilders.
From the mid-18th century, Georgian styles were assimilated into an architectural vernacular that became part and parcel of the training of every architect, builder, carpenter and plasterer, from Edinburgh to Maryland. Georgian succeeded the English Baroque of Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh, Thomas Archer, William Talman, Nicholas Hawksmoor; the architect James Gibbs was a transitional figure, his earlier buildings are Baroque, reflecting the time he spent in Rome in the early 18th century, but he adjusted his style after 1720. Major architects to promote the change in direction from baroque were Colen Campbell, author of the influential book Vitruvius Britannicus. Other prominent architects of the early Georgian period include James Paine, Robert Taylor, John Wood, the Elder; the European Grand Tour became common for wealthy patrons in the period, Italian influence remained dominant, though at the start of the period Hanover Square, Westminster and occupied by Whig supporters of the new dynasty, seems to have deliberately adopted German stylistic elements in their honour vertical bands connecting the windows.
The styles that resulted fall within several categories. In the mainstream of Georgian style were both Palladian architecture—and its whimsical alternatives and Chinoiserie, which were the English-speaking world's equivalent of European Rococo. From the mid-1760s a range of Neoclassical modes were fashionable, associated with the British architects Robert Adam, James Gibbs, Sir William Chambers, James Wyatt, George Dance the Younger, Henry Holland and Sir John Soane. John Nash was one of the
James Adam (architect)
James Adam was a Scottish architect and furniture designer, but was overshadowed by his older brother and business partner, Robert Adam. They were sons of architect William Adam. In 1755 James worked on Gunsgreen House in the Berwickshire town of Eyemouth. In 1758, Robert and their younger brother William Adam started their business in London, focusing on designing complete schemes for the decoration and furnishing of houses. Palladian design was popular, but Robert had evolved a new, more flexible style incorporating elements of classic Roman design alongside influences from Greek and Baroque styles; the Adam brothers’ success can be attributed to a desire to design everything down to the smallest detail, ensuring a sense of unity in their designs. He followed in Robert's footsteps by undertaking the Grand Tour, leaving in May 1760 to October 1763, when he arrive back in London. James succeeded Robert as Architect of the King’s Works in 1768 just before work on the brothers' Adelphi project bankrupted the firm.
From 1771–5 he was engaged with his brother in the design and building of Wedderburn Castle near Duns, Berwickshire. James emerged from his brother's shadow after Robert's death in 1792, designing several notable buildings in Glasgow, including the old Infirmary, Assembly Rooms and the Tron Kirk, he designed Portland Place in central London. However, his glory was short-lived — he died at his home in London's Albermarle Street in October 1794. During their lifetime Robert and James Adam published two volumes of their designs, Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam. Courts of Justice and Corn Market, now Shire Hall, Hertford. Altered, but restored to original design. A joint project with Robert Adam; the Adelphi development, London demolished 1930s, a ceiling & fireplace are in the Victoria and Albert Museum 7 Adam Street Gunsgreen House, Berwickshire Adam style
High Commission of Kenya, London
The Kenya High Commission in London was established in 1963 to pursue Kenya’s national interest in the United Kingdom. The diplomatic mission in London is accredited to the International Maritime Organization, the Commonwealth of Nations. Kenya and the UK enjoy cordial relations, the mission's mandate is to forge closer relations between the people of Kenya and the people of United Kingdom in pursuit of deeper bilateral and multilateral cooperation in trade and investments, culture and technology as well as other fields for mutual benefit; the High Commission is housed in one of a group of Grade II* listed buildings in Portland Place. Official site Brief overview of embassy building
Thomas Foley, 1st Baron Foley (1716–1777)
Thomas Foley, 1st Baron Foley was a British landowner and politician. Foley was the son of Thomas Foley, MP and his wife Hester and was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge; the Foley family descended from the prominent ironmaster Thomas Foley. He succeeded his father in 1749. Foley was the cousin and heir of Thomas Foley, 2nd Baron Foley, thus inheriting Witley Court and the extensive Great Witley estate; this included ironworks at Wilden and Shelsley Walsh, which were leased about at the end of his life. He was elected to the House of Commons for Droitwich in 1741, a constituency he represented until 1746 and again from 1754 to 1768, followed by election to represent Herefordshire between 1768 and 1776; the latter year the title held by his cousin was revived when Foley was raised to the peerage as Baron Foley of Kidderminster in the County of Worcester. Lord Foley married the Hon. Grace, daughter of George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne, in 1740, they had seven children: Thomas Foley, 2nd Baron Foley, to whose family he devised the Great Witley estate Hon. Grace Foley, married James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Clanbrassil, on 21 May 1774 Hon. Edward Foley, to whose family he devised his paternal Stoke Edith estate Hon. Andrew Foley, to whose family he devised the Newent estate Hon. Anne Foley, married Sir Edward Winnington, 2nd Baronet on 12 September 1776 Hon. Elizabeth Foley Hon. Mary Foley, married Richard ClerkFoley died in November 1777, aged 61.
He was succeeded in the barony by Thomas. Kidd, Williamson, David. Debrett's Baronetage. New York: St Martin's Press, 1990. Will of 1st Lord Foley www.thepeerage.com Leigh Rayment's Peerage Pages
Oxford Circus tube station
Oxford Circus is a London Underground station serving Oxford Circus at the junction of Regent Street and Oxford Street, with entrances on all four corners of the intersection. The station is an interchange between the Bakerloo and Victoria lines; as of 2017, it is the third busiest station on the London Underground. On the Central line it is between Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road, on the Bakerloo line it is between Regent's Park and Piccadilly Circus, on the Victoria line it is between Green Park and Warren Street; the station is in Travelcard Zone 1. The Central line station opened on 30 July 1900, the Bakerloo line station on 10 March 1906. Both are Grade II listed; the station was rebuilt in 1912 to relieve congestion. Further congestion led to another reconstruction in 1923. Numerous improvements were made as part of the New Works Programme and as a flood protection measure. To accommodate additional passengers on the Victoria line, a new ticket hall was built; the Victoria line platforms opened on 7 March 1969, including cross-platform interchange with the Bakerloo line.
In the 1890s, the Central London Railway published a notice of a private bill that would be presented to Parliament for the 1890 parliamentary session. The bill planned an underground route between Cornhill; these plans were accepted by both Houses of Parliament on 5 August 1891. The CLR employed the engineers James Henry Greathead, Sir John Fowler, Sir Benjamin Baker to design the railway. Tunnelling was completed by the end of 1898 and the official opening of the CLR by the Prince of Wales took place on 27 June 1900. Oxford Circus station opened as part of the first section of the line, between Shepherd's Bush and Bank; as part of the 1935—40 New Works Programme, the misaligned tunnels of the central section on the Central line that slowed running speeds were corrected and the platforms lengthened to accommodate longer trains. In November 1891, notice was given of a private bill that would be presented to Parliament for the construction of the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway; the railway was planned to run underground from Marylebone to Elephant & Castle via Baker Street and Waterloo.
The route was approved in 1900. Construction commenced in August 1898 under the direction of Sir Benjamin Baker, W. R. Galbraith and R. F. Church; the works were carried out by Company of Tregedar Works, Bow. Oxford Circus was altered below ground following a Board of Trade inspection; the official opening of the BS&WR by Sir Edwin Cornwall took place on 10 March 1906. The first section of the BS&WR was between Baker Street and Lambeth North known as Kennington Road. A proposal for a new underground railway running from Victoria to Walthamstow was first proposed by a Working Party set up by the British Transport Commission in 1948, though that followed a 1946 plan for an East Croydon to Finsbury Park line. A route was approved in 1955 with future extensions to be decided though funding for the construction was not approved by the government until 1962. Construction began in 1962 on the initial Walthamstow to Victoria section, where cross-platform interchange were to be provided at Oxford Circus; the Victoria line platforms opened on 7 March 1969.
The station opened as part of a second extension from Warren Street to Victoria. Cross-platform interchange between the Bakerloo and Victoria lines was provided by constructing the Victoria line platforms parallel to the Bakerloo ones. On 13 February 1976, a 20–30 lb bomb left in a case at the station by the Provisional IRA was discovered and safely defused; the station, at the height of the afternoon rush hour, was evacuated. On 23 November 1984, during renovation works, the station suffered a severe fire which burned out the northbound Victoria line platform, it is believed that the fire was caused by smoking materials being pushed through a ventilation grille into a storeroom where they set several materials on fire. This caused the Victoria line between Warren Street and Victoria to be suspended until 18 December the same year; this incident led to a smoking ban being introduced on trains in July 1984. On 3 March 1997, a train derailment caused the northbound Bakerloo line service between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus to be suspended for 12 days.
On 11 August 2017, a fire occurred on a Bakerloo Line train, evacuated at Oxford Circus. Services were suspended between Castle and Paddington; the CLR and BSWR had separate surface buildings and lift shafts. The station buildings, which remain today as exits from the station, were built on confined plots on either side of Argyll Street on the south side of Oxford Street, just east of the circus itself; the stations as built were separate, but connecting passages were soon provided at platform level. The surviving Central London Railway building to the east of Argyll Street is the best surviving example of stations designed by Harry Bell Measures, the Bakerloo line building to the west is a classic Leslie Green structure. Both are Grade II listed since 20 July 2011. From the outset, overcrowding has been a constant problem, there have been numerous improvements to the facilities and below-ground arrangements to deal with this. After much discussion between the two separate operators, a major reconstruction began in 1912.
This entailed a new ticket hall, serving both lines, being built in the basement of the Bakerloo station, with the Bakerloo lifts removed and new deep-level escalators opened down to the Bakerloo line level. Access to the CLR was by way of existing deep-level subways; the new works
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-British author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. He is best known for a number of novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between emigre Americans, English people, continental Europeans – examples of such novels include The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, his works were experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James made use of a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to impressionist painting. James published articles and books of criticism, biography and plays.
Born in the United States, James relocated to Europe as a young man and settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916. James was born at 2 Washington Place in New York City on 15 April 1843, his parents were Henry James Sr.. His father was intelligent, steadfastly congenial, a lecturer and philosopher who had inherited independent means from his father, an Albany banker and investor. Mary came from a wealthy family long settled in New York City, her sister Katherine lived with her adult family for an extended period of time. Henry Jr. had three brothers, one year his senior, younger brothers Wilkinson and Robertson. His younger sister was Alice; the family first lived in Albany, at 70 N. Pearl St. and moved to Fourteenth Street in New York City when James was still a young boy. His education was calculated by his father to expose him to many influences scientific and philosophical. James did not share the usual education in Greek classics.
Between 1855 and 1860, the James' household traveled to London, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Newport, Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests and publishing ventures, retreating to the United States when funds were low. Henry studied with tutors and attended schools while the family traveled in Europe, their longest stays were in France, where Henry became fluent in French. He was afflicted with a stutter. In 1860 the family returned to Newport. There Henry became a friend of the painter John La Farge, who introduced him to French literature, in particular, to Balzac. James called Balzac his "greatest master," and said that he had learned more about the craft of fiction from him than from anyone else. In the autumn of 1861 Henry received an injury to his back, while fighting a fire; this injury, which resurfaced at times throughout his life, made him unfit for military service in the American Civil War. In 1864 the James family moved to Boston, Massachusetts to be near William, who had enrolled first in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and in the medical school.
In 1862 Henry realised that he was not interested in studying law. He pursued his interest in literature and associated with authors and critics William Dean Howells and Charles Eliot Norton in Boston and Cambridge, formed lifelong friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. the future Supreme Court Justice, with James and Annie Fields, his first professional mentors. His first published work was a review of a stage performance, "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket," published in 1863. About a year A Tragedy of Error, his first short story, was published anonymously. James's first payment was for an appreciation of Sir Walter Scott's novels, written for the North American Review, he wrote fiction and non-fiction pieces for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly, where Fields was editor. In 1871 he published his first novel and Ward, in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly; the novel was published in book form in 1878. During a 14-month trip through Europe in 1869–70 he met Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, George Eliot.
Rome impressed him profoundly. "Here I am in the Eternal City," he wrote to his brother William. "At last—for the first time—I live!" He attempted to support himself as a freelance writer in Rome secured a position as Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune, through the influence of its editor John Hay. When these efforts failed he returned to New York City. During 1874 and 1875 he published Transatlantic Sketches, A Passionate Pilgrim, Roderick Hudson. During this early period in his career he was influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1869 he settled in London. There he established relationships with Macmillan and other publishers, who paid for serial installments that they would publish in book form; the audience for these serialized novels was made up of middle-class women, James struggled to fashion serious literary work within the strictures imposed by editors' and publishers' notions of what was suitable for young women to read. He lived in rented rooms but was able to join gentlemen's clubs that had libraries and where he could entertain male friends.
He was introduced to English society by Henry Adams and Charles Milnes Gaskel
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