Dance had been commissioned by the 5th Earl of Bristol (who succeeded to the earldom in 1803 and became 1st Marquess in 1826) to rebuild the family town house at 6 St James's Square, first erected in 1675-6. (St James's Square is the oldest of London's West End squares.) In the event, Dance did not carry out the work, a John Field being appointed and a conservative design based on the mid-eighteenth century front of 2 St James's Square was built, 1819-20. Dance's drawings are not dated though an 1808 watermark gives a post quem clue. Considering the date of Field's work and Dance's virtual retirement by 1817, it seems likely that this is a late scheme of around 1816.

Unsympathetic to the existing architecture of St Jame's Square, Dance's designs might suggest an office building or a department store if it were not for their date. Drawing [SM D3/7/12], for example, in its proportion of window to wall and even distribution of glazing might be a shop on four floors rather than an aristocratic town house. These designs, between them, offer the clearest example of Dance's rationalist, linear style of Neo-Classicism and can be associated with his design for the south elevation of Coleorton, c.1804 [SM D1/11/23] in their abstract reductionism.

The Survey of London volume for St James's Square comments (p.104) on 'Dance's admiration for the highly original French neo-classical architecture of is time...'. Kalman wrote (p.210) that 'French influence is indeed present in the drafted stonework, the vertical composition, the larger-scaled parts, the play of solids and voids, and the general air of classical coldness. The architecture of France provided Dance with ideas in his later years as it had a half-century earlier'. Watkin (1983, p.44) notes that 'one of Soane's most original compositions, the north range of the Waiting Room Courtyard at the Bank of England of 1804-05 is closely paralleled by Dance's unexecuted scheme of c.1815 for No. 6 St James's Square.' The composition of piers, windows and cornice does have similarities though Soane chose to break the emphatically trabeated system with Diocletian windows at ground level rather than (as Dance had done) at attic level. The austerity of Dance's design is prophetic of some of Schinkel's work: for example, the proposed Bazaar, Unter den Linden, Berlin, 1827 or the Bauakademie, Berlin, 1831-6 and later, of Alexander 'Greek' Thomson in Glasgow.

6 St James's Square was demolished in 1958 and replaced by a Fitzroy Robinson & Partners office building, 1958-60, of no architectural interest.

LITERATURE. Survey of London, XXIX, Parish of St James Westminster, Part I , 1960, pp.103-05; Kalman pp.209-10; D Stillman, English Neo-classical architecture, 1988, p.203; D. Watkin, 'Soane and his contempories' in John Soane, [no ed.], 1983, p.44.

Group

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