Bryanston Square

Bryanston Square is an 800 feet (240 m) by 200 feet (61 m) garden square in Marylebone, London. Terraced buildings surround it — often merged, converted or sub-divided, some of which remain residential. The southern end has the William Pitt Byrne memorial fountain. Next to both ends are cycle parking spaces.

The green centre and west, north and east façades of some of the square and the round portico cupola of the church on the horizon after the rectangle has narrowed to form Wyndham Place.
A map showing the Bryanston Square ward of St Marylebone Metropolitan Borough as it appeared in 1916.

The most notable merger is the Swiss Embassy at the north-east end. The square's narrow ends are broken by broad approach streets of the same British Regency date. More recent style flanks the mid-west range of the square in the form of №s 31, 32 and 33 which are three times an ordinary range of its widths, meaning the numbering scheme today skips ten following numbers, destroyed to make room for these, to culminate with №s 44 to 50 and the highest-numbered buildings of Great Cumberland Place – its corner houses, №s  63 and 68. That street, this square and Wyndham Place run broad and straight for 750 metres without building projections between an 1821-built church and Marble Arch, moved to its permanent site in 1851.

Traffic circulates clockwise around the square and numbering runs anti-clockwise.

Amenities and neighbours

Wyndham Place
Wyndham Place from the square's north end that overlaps Crawford Street

Wyndham Place (its mainstay №s 1 to 16) including front, railed space of its buildings forms a purposeful gap (known building line) 60 feet (18 m) across which runs north from that end of the square to become a 190-foot-wide forecourt, with seated areas, to the Church of St Mary's – built in 1821 to designs by Robert Smirke. The church is Grade I listed. Its №s 3 to 6 and 9 to 16 are alike light-brown brick terraces with white, ashlar-style stucco to the lower floors, by Parkinson, and completed by 1823, they are Grade II listed (this is the lowest and dominant of three categories).[1][2][3]

Great Cumberland Place
Main articles: Great Cumberland Place and Marble Arch

This equally broad street with parking spaces flanking runs 350 metres (1,150 ft) south. Mid-way it broadens into a green crescent, Wallenberg Place, the arc of which is fronted by five buildings including Western Marble Arch Synagogue. The thoroughfare culminates with, across an approach to Oxford Street, Marble Arch aligned just off-centre before which, flanking, are: Cumberland Court and the Cumberland Hotel which incorporates the tube station and walkway to Hyde Park. Its predominant use classes are homes and hotels.

Architectural context and features

The square, taken at its greatest, is ​2⁄3 the size of Portman Square. It has roads, broad pavements and a private tree-planted garden. Wetherby Preparatory School occupies part of the south west corner. Listed are:

  • the east side, №s 1 to 21 and so 1A[4]
  • the north-west side, №s 25, 25A and 26[5]
  • most of the west side:
    • №s 27, 27A, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32[6]
    • №s 44 to 48[7]
  • the south-west side, *№s 49, 50[8] and 63 Gt. Cumberland. Pl.[9]
  • the south-east side, 68 Great Cumberland Place[10]

The neat (geometric) façades contrast with fluctuations in colour and height. Slightly varied ochre brickwork from building to building (historically referred to as 'yellow bricks') is accompanied in by differing mansard roofs, mostly of grey slate. A little facing red-brown brick is used. Decorative black balconies above the first level are accompanied by a white chamfered band course at the penultimate level before the mansard. At the divide of the mansards or parapet roofs with roof gardens is a longer such course forming a more pronounced white band course (the main cornice). All of the casements are tall white, multi-pane sash windows of uniform height and distribution.[5][6][7] The first-listed above was finished in 1811 to designs by Joseph Parkinson.[4] The doric and ionic orders are used but symmetry is stressed.[4] №s  10 to 12 and 19 to 21 were rebuilt to match, due to war damage.[4]

In the south is the William Pitt Byrne Memorial Fountain, erected in 1862, a Grade II (initial category) listed monument under the statutory protection scheme,[11] as is an ornamental water pump at the opposite end.[12]

Ambassadorial presence
  • Swiss Embassy in London at 1A (terraces formerly known as №s 16 to 22).

History

Named after its founder Henry William Portman's home village of Bryanston (as lords of the manor) in Dorset, it was built as part of the family's estate between 1810 and 1815, along with Montagu Square beyond the nominally-associated eastern Mews.

Notable people

Tributes

The Bryanston suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, is named after the square.[16]

Notes
  1. Number 38 was demolished in 1940 due to damage during the Blitz[15]
gollark: It reminds me of the plethora portable keyboard thing.
gollark: I never actually did this, but it might have been cool to.
gollark: A nice thing about DFPWM is that you could theoretically encode it from CC, since the codec was very simple.
gollark: Is that a problem? You can just extract free capital from them.
gollark: I used my own highly efficient™ program which just downloads an entire 10MB tape file into memory.

References
  1. Historic England. "3 to 6 Wyndham Place (1066061)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  2. Historic England. "94 Crawford Street and 9 to 13 Wyndham Place (1225095)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  3. Historic England. "14 to 16 Wyndham Place (1357408)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  4. Historic England. "1-21 and 1A (1066352)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  5. Historic England. "25-26 (1066353)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  6. Historic England. "28-32 (1066354)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  7. Historic England. "44-48 (1066355)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  8. Historic England. "49-50 (1066356)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  9. Historic England. "57-63 odds Great Cumberland Place (1357062)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  10. Historic England. "58-68 odds Great Cumberland Place (1357062)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  11. "William Pitt Byrne Memorial Fountain, Paddington". British Listed Buildings Online. Retrieved 1 March 2011.
  12. Historic England. "William Pitt Byrne Memorial Fountain (1066357)". National Heritage List for England.
  13. "Shaw-Lefevre, George John (SHW849GJ)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  14. Maryna Fraser, ‘Bailey, Sir Abraham , first baronet (1864–1940)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 25 Aug 2008
  15. "Abe Bailey Biography". Archived from the original on 7 May 2018. Retrieved 26 January 2018.
  16. "The History of Bryanston | The Heritage Portal". www.theheritageportal.co.za. Retrieved 19 June 2018.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.