Decimus Burton

Decimus Burton was born in London on 30 September 1800, the tenth son of James Burton, the foremost builder of Georgian London. He trained in his father's office and under George Maddox, and set up his own practice early. At eighteen he designed the villa The Holme for his family in Regent's Park; at twenty-three he was the architect of the Colosseum in the same park, whose dome was slightly larger than that of St Paul's. He travelled when that was still unusual, studying the ruins of Italy and Greece and later visiting Canada and the United States. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was among the earliest members of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and for a time its vice-president. He died unmarried on 14 December 1881, aged 81, having spent most of his last years at St Leonards-on-Sea, the seaside resort that his father had almost entirely built.

In 1824 he was commissioned by the Office of Woods and Forests to draw up new railings and gates for the royal parks. The result was the screen at Hyde Park Corner and an arch, built from 1825 to 1827 as an outer entrance to Buckingham Palace. Burton intended it to carry a gilded quadriga and rich sculptural decoration, but the Treasury declined to pay for the sculpture; in 1846 a colossal equestrian statue of Wellington was hoisted on top instead, to widespread derision. His will even set aside £2,000 for its removal, a legacy he eventually withdrew. The arch was dismantled from February 1883 and rebuilt around 1885 on its present site; the statue went to Aldershot, and the quadriga that crowns the arch today dates from 1912. On Pall Mall, the Athenaeum (1826–1830), a club for "scientific and literary men and Artists" promoted by John Wilson Croker, is a stucco Graeco-Roman building with a version of the Panathenaic frieze carved by John Henning junior. In Regent's Park, Burton worked with John Nash on many terraces and villas, and designed several buildings of the London Zoo. Architect to the Royal Zoological Society, the Royal Botanic Society and Kew, he also laid out the grounds of Dublin Zoo in 1831–1832 and designed several of its buildings, then spent 1834 to 1849 on the general improvement of Phoenix Park.

From 1828 a Mr Ward retained him to lay out the Calverley Park estate in Tunbridge Wells, work that occupied him for more than twenty years. His practice turned from then on mostly to country houses, villas and the laying out of building estates, in Tunbridge Wells as in St Leonards-on-Sea and Brighton. He worked chiefly in the Greek style then in fashion, which he handled with judgment, never sacrificing the needs of modern life to archaeological exactness. In 1905 the Architectural Review joked that a future historian might be excused for concluding there had been two Decimus Burtons, and that in his work "quantity and quality seem to be present in inverse ratio". He died four days before G. E. Street, an architect of the then fashionable Gothic Revival; his classical architecture had gone out of fashion, and the coincidence led many to remark how swiftly he had been forgotten.

Glasshouses, however, run through his whole career. As early as 1822, influenced by J. C. Loudon's writings on iron and glass, he built a curved dome in the Grove House gardens, Regent's Park; in the 1830s he was called on to approve the designs for the Great Stove at Chatsworth, conceived by the head gardener Joseph Paxton. At Kew, the Palm House (1844–1848) came about in disputed circumstances: the Dublin ironfounder Richard Turner had prepared a design that had to be shown to Burton, who insisted on changes. The result, which can fairly be called a joint work, ties Turner's curved glass to ideas from Chatsworth and to a "palm frond order" that Burton had used about ten years earlier at Grimston Park. Nikolaus Pevsner saw in it "one of the boldest pieces of 19th-century functionalism in existence"; Ian Nairn admired its originality and unselfconscious perfection, closer to a beautiful animal or a plant than to the compositions of architecture. Its listing record tentatively attributes to him the Waterlily House of 1852, built for the Victoria waterlily, which the Dictionary of Irish Architects lists among Turner's works. The Temperate House, larger but less experimental, built in stages from 1859 to 1898 and partly open by 1863, is the largest surviving winter garden of its era; Burton's classical sensibility is more apparent in it than Turner's hand. Long regarded as a mere sideshow to his architectural career, these glasshouses were reassessed in the twentieth century, when iron and glass stripped of ornament came to be read as forerunners of modernism.