Blaise Hamlet

Henbury, Gloucestershire. John Nash, architect. 1811

In 1811 John Nash designed Blaise Hamlet, nine rustic cottages grouped harmoniously around a green. Built by John S Harford, a Bristol banker, these charming, ornamented cottages, perhaps more than any other prototypes, set the tone for the picturesque suburban house of the garden suburbs of the early part of this century. Nash's designs at Blaise Hamlet, related to John Plaw's planned villages on country estates, are 'modern' houses in the form of peasant cottages. Set in a casually composed ring around a village green complete with pump and other country touches, each cottage has a private garden at the rear as well. Though the cottages are quite alike in terms of their basic conveniences and are similarly sized, great care was given to make each seem distinct. The use of thatch on the roofs was as much a conceit in 1811 as a hundred years later, when it was revived in America and emulated in shingles and tile by the architects H. Van Buren Magonigle and Harrie T Lindeberg.

1 Site plan

2 Cottage with dovecote gable

3 Early view of the green

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This map, made in 1814, forcefully portrays the courage of Nash's proposal for the location of Regent Street to connect Carlton House, the residence of the Regent, with the Crown lands to the north. Carlton House is shown in blue at the bottom of the map, with Portland Place at the north, leading to the Circus and Regent's Park, as shown in the plan on page 186. Nash envisioned the street as a connector between the jumbled pattern of the Soho area around Golden Square to the east, and the formal, organized, aristocratic section relating to Cavendish and Hanover Squares to the west. How well he did this is attested by the fact, pointed out by Sir John Summerson, that Regent Street immediately became (and remains today) an important center in the civic life of London, in contrast to other, more arbitrarily placed streets such as, for example, Kingsway.

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