CANNON STREET: THE WAY TO VICTORIAN LONDON.

摘要

Cannon Street was the first street in the City of London consistently to exhibit Early Victorian commercial architecture. This involved a new style of architecture, new building types, increased intervention by professional architects, and a new awareness of the street as a whole.;Created between 1850 and 1854, Cannon Street appeared when the prevailing Regency style of commercial street architecture was being condemned. Authorized by two Parliamentary Acts, and undertaken by the City Corporation, Cannon Street promised to solve the problems of the Regency approach.;Monumental clubhouses, banks, insurance companies, and commercial chambers of the 1830's and 1840's provided the street's buildings with Italian Renaissance-style models. Chamfered corners, haunched ground-story arcades and Palladian windows derived from Barry, Cockerell, Gibson, and I'Anson were used throughout the street. Regency stucco, cast ornament, and colonnades were eschewed. Shops were better integrated with the upper floors than were their Georgian or Regency predecessors. Plate glass, often criticized for its insubstantiality and incongruity, though employed, was satisfying in appearance because solid piers were generously used in the ground stories.;New types of commercial buildings came to Cannon Street: commercial chambers and wholesale warehouses. Both had existed earlier, but in Cannon Street they became dominant. Replacing Georgian terrace houses, the new buildings were clearly commercial rather than residential. Even in partly domestic wholesale warehouses, accommodations were hotel-like. These new warehouses, first seen in the large, midland textile towns, constituted in size, style, and innovative construction, a new direction in London's commercial street architecture. Yet even the smaller commercial chambers revealed an important change. Where earlier (and later) individual merchants had vied for attention while sacrificing stylistic harmony, the commercial chambers in Cannon suppressed self-advertisement to maintain uniform facades.;Because today Cannon Street has retained little of its nineteenth century character, I first had to "reconstruct" it. This was done with the aid of maps, sewer records, photographs, engravings, and drawings. The records of the City Architect, James Bunstone Bunning, proved helpful, as were almanacs, trade periodicals, newspapers, and magazines.;Much that was bad in Regency commercial architecture was attributed to builders. In Cannon Street the smaller structures were still generally done by builders, but here in fact they sometimes did better than professionals. Yet Cannon Street revealed once and for all that the monumental commercial commissions were not firmly in the hands of the architects.;In Cannon Street the entire approach to street architecture changes. The primary view shifted from the facade to the chamfered corner. And the corners were like billboards--always seizing the would-be customer.