page_title: James Burton (property developer)
section_title: Family
hierarchical_section_title: James Burton (property developer) / Family
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Walter Scott (1771 - 1832), novelist and poet.
context_page_description: Lieutenant-Colonel James Burton was the most successful and imperative property developer of Regency and Georgian London. By the time of his death in 1837, Burton had built over 3000 properties, and his buildings covered over 250 acres of central London. His imperative contribution to the development of the West End has been acknowledged by James Manwaring Baines, John Summerson, and Dana Arnold. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, in London: The Unique City, commended Burton's buildings, but did not identify their architect. The 21st century Oxford Dictionary of National Biography contends that Burton were 'the most successful developer in late Georgian London, responsible for some of its most characteristic architecture'.
  James built the majority of the Bloomsbury district; St John's Wood; Regent Street; Regent Street St. James; Waterloo Place, St. James's; Swallow Street; Regent’s Park. James financed, patronized, and built the other projects of John Nash around Regent’s Park - most of which were predominantly designed by James's son, Decimus Burton, rather than by Nash himself - to the extent that the Commissioners of Woods described James, not Nash, as ‘the architect of Regent’s Park’.
context_section_description: James Burton was born in Strand, London, as James Haliburton, on 29 July 1761. He was the son of William Haliburton (1731–1785), a London property developer of Scottish descent, whose family originated in Roxburghshire, and of Mary Foster (previously Mary Johnson) (1735–1785), whom his father married in 1760. Mary Foster was the daughter of Nicholas Foster of Kirkby Fleetham, Yorkshire, and William Haliburton was her second husband: Mary had been previously married to a man surnamed 'Johnson'. William Haliburton and Mary Foster had two sons, James and another who died in infancy. Burton's father William Haliburton's paternal grandparents were Rev. James Haliburton (1681–1756) and Margaret Eliott, daughter of Sir William Eliott, 2nd Baronet and aunt of George Augustus Eliott, 1st Baron Heathfield. They had 7 daughters and 2 sons, William (father of James), and Andrew. James Burton's father William was descended from John Haliburton (1573–1627), from whom Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was descended on the maternal side. Burton was a cousin of the Canadian author and British Tory MP Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and of the British civil servant Lord Haliburton, who was the first native Canadian to be raised to the Peerage of the United Kingdom.
  James (b.1761) was christened with the name 'James Haliburton' at Presbyterian Chapel, Soho, London. He shortened his surname to Burton in 1794, subsequent to a dispute with his family, between the birth of his fourth child and the birth of his fifth child.
caption: Burton was a cousin of the poet Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet.
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