One of the greatest pleasures London has to offer is its squares. Whether grand or compact, these spaces offer a range of delights and details and regardless of how busy the traffic progressing around them is, they bring a sense of calm and repose in the bustle of the capital.
And there are so many of them. Take a glance at the map, and the squares come up in profusion and clusters. There’s the circuit made up of Grosvenor, Hanover, Berkeley and St. James’s squares. Drift a bit further west and there’s Cleveland, Sussex, Gloucester and Hyde Park. Go north of Oxford Street, and there’s a plethora: Bryanston and Montagu, Portman, Manchester, and Cavendish. Amble towards Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury and another great collection is encountered consisting of Fitzroy, Bedford, Russell, Tavistock, Gordon and Bloomsbury. Squares, and rectangles called squares, everywhere.
The square-root, as it were, of this square-mania is found in St. James’s, for this was one of the first to be laid out. The origins of the project can be found in Charles II’s fondness for St. James’s Palace and its neighbouring park, which he expanded and improved. The king enjoyed a good stroll in the park where he regularly played palla-maglio, a ball game played with a mallet along a course, a course which gave Pall Mall its name.
St. James’s soon became the place to be. Wishing to be near the King and sensing a commercial opportunity at the same time, Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Alban’s, had the idea of placing a square on the north side of Pall Mall. His original plan envisaged the selling of a small number of plots for aristocrats to build large houses. However, the lack of firm commitments led the earl to open up the sale to speculative builders. This proved a much better prospect, and the new houses soon attracted the nobility and people of importance. As well as Jermyn himself, the Duke of Ormonde took up residence and by 1721 six other dukes had their London home in the square. Smart streets soon sprang up in the vicinity and at the north end of Duke of York Street Sir Christopher Wren designed the beautiful St. James’s Piccadilly as the church for the new community. St. James’s Square thus helped establish both a business model and a style of life and architecture.
What makes the squares impressive to this day is their scale. Most are relatively modest in size; they provide a sense of space, of elbow-room, without being overwhelming. This perfect ratio means the squares embrace and welcome, particularly if the central space is publicly accessible (not all are). Here, in these mini parks, with their trees, benches, statuary, and sometimes tea huts and stalls, the pace of modern city life slows down. To take a bench and sit and contemplate conjures up the ghosts of London’s past.
One of my favourites, even though much of the original architecture has been replaced, is Hanover Square. This is largely because when I first left school, I worked just round the corner, and this was a great place to eat lunch. While munching away, I could stare at Francis Chantrey’s statue of William Pitt the Younger on its very high pedestal (nearly five metres). Years later, I read that Chantrey had insisted on this height but quickly regretted it. It certainly needs a bit of neck-craning to take it in. I also watched the seasons change from here. At Christmas the lights went up in the buildings and in the shops on Regent and Oxford streets; in the spring the plane trees came into leaf and the flowers burst out, and in autumn there was the crunchy golden-brown of fallen leaves. The final distraction was the nearby parish church of St. George, designed by John James. Famous as the place where so many fashionable and important people were married, it is the flipside of this association which always comes to my mind, for it is also the church that fills Bertie Wooster with dread as he seeks to avoid becoming spliced to a Florence Cray or Honoria Glossop.
Come on a West End walk with me and you will see Bertie Wooster’s London and much more along the way.
