page_title: Palmeira Square
section_title: The square
hierarchical_section_title: Palmeira Square / Architecture / The square
caption_attribution_description: 18–30 Palmeira Square, Hove, City of Brighton and Hove, England. The west side of the mid-19th-century Palmeira Square residential development in the centre of Hove. Listed at Grade II by English Heritage (NHLE Code 1187581)
context_page_description: Palmeira Square is a mid-19th-century residential development in Hove, part of the English city and seaside resort of Brighton and Hove. At the southern end it adjoins Adelaide Crescent, another architectural set-piece which leads down to the seafront; large terraced houses occupy its west and east sides, separated by a public garden; and at the north end is one of Hove's main road junctions. This is also called Palmeira Square, and its north side is lined with late 19th-century terraced mansions. Commercial buildings and a church also stand on the main road, which is served by many buses.
  The land was originally occupied by "the world's largest conservatory", the Anthaeum—a visitor attraction planned by botanist, author and building promoter Henry Phillips. The giant dome's collapse and total destruction on the day it was due to open in 1833 made Phillips go blind from shock, and the debris occupied the site for many years. Work began in the early 1850s and was largely complete in the mid-1860s, although commercial and residential buildings such as Palmeira House and Gwydyr Mansions continued to be added at the northern end throughout the late 19th century.
context_section_description: Architecturally, Palmeira Square is "quite different from Adelaide Crescent or Brunswick Square ... when Victorian architecture was out of fashion, [it was] condemned as being heavily Italianate".  Having been "one of the most notorious examples" of the tendency in Brighton and Hove for residential developments to take much longer than planned, it developed as a natural evolution of the style of neighbouring Adelaide Crescent.  Begun as a Regency-style set-piece, this developed in a Neo-Renaissance direction, before work resumed in the 1850s in a simpler post-Regency style.  Palmeira Square was then built in a "more full-blooded" interpretation of this Victorian/Italianate theme.  Palmeira Mansions, completed nearly 30 years after work started on the square, were designed in the same style and contribute to the square as a single composition, "continuing its ... grandeur and scale".  Palmeira Square's style, marking the transition from Regency into Victorian Italianate, has been likened to the terraces around London's Hyde Park that were built at the same time.  Architectural historians Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner, writing in the 1960s, stated that this gave the square "architectural interest" but "little architectural merit", though.  Another author, comparing the houses with those of Adelaide Crescent, wrote of "an undisguised Victorianism of a vigorous and healthy, but nevertheless decidedly inferior, quality".
  The 17 houses of the west side form a long, straight terrace of five storeys.  Under their stucco façades is brick, rubble and bungaroosh—a composite building material commonly found behind stucco in 18th- and 19th-century buildings in Brighton and Hove.  Each house has three windows to each storey (either blocked or containing a sash window, and pilasters and quoins between some of the neighbouring buildings mark the terrace out into a symmetrical five-part composition which has been described as either 2–4–5–4–2 or 2–5–3–5–2.  The top storey is in the form of an attic, and the treatment of the windows is different: they are on a moulded cornice, and some are arched.  On the floor below, the windows are surrounded by Vitruvian scroll patterns, and at the storey below that they are flanked by pilasters which hold up an entablature and small pediment.  A cast iron balcony surrounds the first-floor bay windows and is supported by the top of the Doric-columned entrance porch, which has a stuccoed balustrade.  According to one writer, "the heavy emphasis of [these] porches give[s] the square an air of respectable solidity"—as do the heavy doors with their recessed panels, moulded ornamentation and decorative fanlights.  Original interior fittings include a large "Jacobean-cum-Baroque" chimneypiece in the hall of number 32.
  The terrace on the east side is identical, again having 17 five-storey houses with hipped slate roofs hidden behind parapets, three-window ranges with sash windows and heavy Doric porches.  As on the west side, the house in the centre projects slightly from the terrace and has a larger square bay window rising through the first and second floors, forming a loggia which is supported on a colonnaded porch with rustication.
caption: The houses of Palmeira Square have stuccoed façades and rise to five storeys.
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