Adelaide Crescent

In 1830 Isaac Lyon Goldsmid bought the rest of the Wick estate, west of Brunswick Town, and commissioned Decimus Burton to lay out a new development there; building started that same year. The scheme, called 'Queen Adelaide Crescent', was for a single half-moon crescent whose houses at both ends faced the sea.

Only numbers 1 to 10, at the south-east corner, were built to Burton's design. In the same years Goldsmid paid for a vast iron-framed glasshouse north of the crescent, on the ground now taken up by the gardens of Palmeira Square: the Anthaeum, planned by the botanist and landscape gardener Henry Phillips and designed by the architect Amon Henry Wilds. Its dome, crowned by a cupola, covered more than 0.6 hectares and was to house a landscaped tropical garden and other attractions; it collapsed in 1833, shortly before it was due to open.

After a long pause, work on the crescent resumed only in 1850. The remaining houses went up between 1850 and 1860, again for Goldsmid, to a different plan and in a simplified style: instead of the half-moon, two wings curve northwards and open onto a new square, Palmeira Square.

The two ranges of houses were first listed in 1950 and the walls, ramps and stairways on the south side in 1969, all now at Grade II*; the retaining wall on the south side of the gardens was listed at Grade II in 1992.

The houses are stucco over brick, with moulded cornices and string courses, a rusticated ground floor and slate roofs. The plan follows a cyma (ogee) curve across a sloping site, turning back at the south end around numbers 1 to 3. Together with the later Palmeira Square, the development marks the shift from Burton's late Regency manner to the Italianate style that was coming into favour in the early Victorian years. On the east range (numbers 1 to 19) the ground-floor windows are round-headed and the others square-headed; they are mostly sashes without glazing bars, with French windows on the first floor. Cast-iron balconies run from house to house, except at numbers 1 to 6, which each have their own balustraded balcony. Heights range from three storeys with an attic to five over a basement, and this range has no porches.

Numbers 1 to 3, facing south, have a front of three, five and three bays: three storeys and an attic, with a four-storey central block marked by a pediment and a frieze. The outer bays carry a heavily moulded bracketed cornice, with attic windows between the brackets, and a balustraded parapet; the first-floor windows have moulded surrounds, some topped by a pediment and the others by a straight entablature on console brackets. The west range (numbers 20 to 38) has five storeys over a basement, and its cast-iron balconies carry on around flat-roofed pilaster porches.

The retaining walls and stairways on the south side, drawn by Burton around 1830 as part of the original layout, are render over rubble or brick, with vermiculated rustication, bottle balusters and square piers; a stairway goes down to Kingsway at the east end, and the west end marks the road entrance to the crescent. They were restored in 1981-82. The retaining wall on the south side of the gardens, from the same period, is about 90 m long: roughly 2 m high at the centre, it drops to about 75 cm on either side, where the road climbs. It is buttressed by fourteen square piers decorated with bands of ashlar and vermiculation, with moulded caps and a segmental pediment whose tympanum bears a stylised Etruscan palmette.

At the heart of the development, the gardens were designed with it. An Ordnance Survey map of about 1870 shows perimeter and winding paths and informal planting there, and the garden keeps much of its original layout.

The crescent is a residential development: almost all the houses have been divided into flats. The central gardens, at first reserved for residents, became public when their railings were taken down during the Second World War, and the council took over their upkeep.

These are private homes: the crescent is seen from outside, from the street and the central gardens.