What Stonehenge Has to Do with a Georgian Terrace
Submitted by Andy_B on Tuesday, 03 November 2026 Page Views: 3
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Fourteen years later work started on his Circus, a ring of townhouses 318 feet across, sized to echo the bank around Stonehenge at roughly 325. Wood died within three months of the first stone going down. His son finished it.
The Druid theory hasn't aged well. It does tell you something about the Georgians, though: the people building the newest streets in the country were looking backwards, sometimes a very long way.
Pattern books and borrowed money
London's Georgian terraces were rarely grand gestures. Estates like the Portmans' laid out the streets and squares of Marylebone, then leased plots to speculative builders who worked from pattern books, often on credit. Tall first-floor windows, smaller ones above. Cornice, parapet, fanlight. Repeat.Bryanston Square went up that way in the 1810s, designed by the estate's surveyor J. T. Parkinson and built by David Porter, a former chimney sweep. One critic in the Builder later wrote it off, along with neighbouring Montagu Square, for its "dreary uniformity".
That uniformity is now exactly what the listing protects.
York Terrace, part of Nash's scheme for Regent's Park and built in 1822 and 1823 by James Burton's company, pushed the idea further: separate houses lined up behind one palace-like front. Much of it is listed Grade I.
What we find when we open them up
We've worked in both. At Payte Architects London we took a Grade II listed apartment scheme on Bryanston Square through planning and listed building consent, after earlier proposals for the property had run into difficulties. At York Terrace we secured planning permission, listed building consent and conservation area consent to refurbish an apartment of around 177 square metres.Houses like these share some habits.
The front is the show. Behind the matched windows, the back of a terrace is often plainer and more cheaply built, and floor levels, wall thicknesses and room sizes can shift from one house to the next even when the facades look identical.
Almost nothing is in its original plan. Most of these houses were built for single families and later divided into flats, so the layout you inherit is a stack of other people's decisions. A big part of our job is working out which of those decisions still matter and which can quietly go.
They were built with lime, and they move. Sloping floors and doors slightly out of square are usually part of the building's character rather than a fault. The trouble tends to start where someone, at some point, added cement or modern plaster that traps moisture in the walls.
And every change has to earn its place. Under listing, a new opening or a moved partition has to be justified historically, not by how it looks, so a surviving cornice or the depth of a window reveal becomes evidence that shapes what gets approved.
Not everything is as old as it seems, either. Several houses on Bryanston Square were rebuilt to match after war damage.
Two hundred years on
Put up quickly, financed on borrowed money, copied out of books in an age when architects went out measuring stone circles. Plenty of people thought them dull.They're now among the most protected homes in London. Keeping them that way while people actually live in them is the balance every project on streets like these has to find.
If you have any questions around this topic, our London team can assist you. Just email [email protected].
