1 William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale (1787-1872) was First Commissioner of Woods, Forests and Land Revenue in Wellington’s administration of 1828-30. Henry Goulburn was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the same years.

2 Colonel Thomas Henry Hastings Davies (1787-1846) served with distinction in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo. Retired on half-pay, he bought an estate in Worcestershire, joined Brooks’s Club and got himself elected as MP for Worcester, a seat which he retained till 1834 and occupied again from 1837 and 1841 ( Thome, R. G., ed., The House of Commons 1790-1820, III, Members A-F (1986))Google Scholar.

3 Davies’s speech on 25 May 1829 opened with severe criticism of the expenditure of the two triumphal arches at Buckingham Palace. Davies then abruptly launched into a personal attack on their architect, ending with a demand for an investigation by the Select Committee of Crown Leases ( Hansard, , Parliamentary debates, N.S., vol. XXI, pp. 1578 ffGoogle Scholar.)

4 For the Suffolk Street episode see the 4th and ¡th Reports of the Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenue, 1823 and 1826. John Edwards (1772-1833) was a cousin of Nash, sharing the double mansion at 14-16 Regent Street. He proposed to take the whole of the east side of the street and build the houses (4th Report, Appendix 6). The leases were for 99 years from 1820 with a peppercorn rent for the first two and a half years. Edwards unloaded his holding between 1822 and 1825, Nash taking six of the sites. The Report of the Select Committee on Crown Leases, which exonerated Nash, is printed in British Parliamentary Papers (1829), III.

5 Mr Shaw was presumably the elder John Shaw (1776-1832), the architect of the great hall of Christ’s Hospital and other notable London buildings.

6 The papers of the Regent’s Canal Company, in the Public Record Office (Kew), consist mainly of the volumes of the minutes of the meetings of the Committee of Directors (RAIL 860/1-15 etc.) See also the Reports of the Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenue cited above.

7 The events leading to Nash’s purchase of Foley House make a rather more complicated story than transpires in the Statement because it seems that Nash was interested in the site several years before the passing of the New Street Act in 1813. The 3rd Lord Foley had employed Nash to enlarge and aggrandize his house at Witley, Worcestershire, in 1805-06. In 1807 Foley mortgaged his London property to Lady Mary Bowlby for £10,000. In 1810 he borrowed £24,000 from Nash against the security of Foley house (Lady Mary’s interest notwithstanding). By July 1811 he had Foley’s authority to pull down the house and to lay out the ground in building lots. It looks as if Nash was interested in the property as a housing speculation. The £24,000 mortgage was now reduced to £14,000 and the profit on the development was to go to repaying Lady Mary Bowlby her £10,000. In the previous year (1810) Nash had received from his masters at the Office of Woods, Forests, etc., instructions to draft proposals for a new street, linking Regent’s Park with Charing Cross, and his proposals came before the public in June 1812. They were debated in Parliament in June 1813, by which time the Duke of Portland had become aware of the threat to Foley House with, as a consequence, the violation of Portland Place of which he was the ground landlord. He offered to buy Foley’s property outright for £42,000 and would, it seems, have done so had not Nash stepped in with a (presumably better) offer. Nash does not tell us what it cost him ‘to pay the sum which Lord Foley demanded’. Timbs, J., Curiosities of London (1868), p. 711 Google Scholar, puts the figure at £70,000, but this is likely to be an exaggeration. All we know is that at Christmas 1813, Nash paid Lord Foley £18,683 105. id. for ‘the remaining part of Foley House’ (CRES 38/1283, no. 14). Having completed the purchase, he sold the small part of the property required for the new street to the Crown for £10,184 on the valuation of S. P. Cockerell (CRES 38/1283, no. 1). Nash continues the story in the Statement. The ‘three very large and expensive houses’ which he had to build and sell to recoup his outlay will have been those on the southward extension of the west side of Portland Place (all now demolished). More conspicuous was Langham House on the part of the property bought by Sir James Langham, Bart. It was a condition of the sale that Nash should be employed as architect for the house, which, on completion, showed signs of failure. There was a furious row between architect and client. Simultaneously it became necessary to shift the line of the street eastwards to avoid demolishing the rear premises of houses on the east side of Cavendish Square. The street had to twist abruptly from its new position to the line of Portland Place and in doing so led to the siting of houses with the backs only a few yards from Langham’s windows. The baronet had no option but to give up some of his land and, in addition, provide a garden more to the public’s advantage than his own. See Builder, (1863), pp. 703-04 and PRO CRES 38/1289.

8 The most conspicious instance of Nash’s participation in the works for which he was officially responsible as architect was the Quadrant in Regent Street. Nash’s brief account of how he undertook the whole project himself is confirmed in the detailed records of the New Street in the Public Record Office (CRES 26/1-5).

9 At the Park Villages Nash confesses that he took the leases to keep himself busy and amused in his old age — a condition which alas! was embittered by his failure at Buckingham Palace. The original plan for the villages, with eight elevations, is in the PRO (reproduced in Summerson, J., Life and Work of John Nash (1989), pl. 37A)Google Scholar. The village prototype which Nash had formed ‘in another part of the country’ was, of course, Blaise, near Bristol.

10 Finally, there are the Carlton House Terraces. The western terrace, the first to be built, was an instant success and all the lots were taken. The eastern terrace moved more slowly and Nash, in his anxiety to see his work completed in his lifetime, took five leases himself and built the houses (Nos 11 to 15). The interiors, where they survive, make the houses instantly recognizable as his. See 6th Report of the Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenue (1829); also CRES 2/533 and MPE891.