Away from Stucco
The architectural history of Belsize Park in the later Victorian period is partly the history of a reaction against the stucco tradition that had dominated the neighbourhood's development in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. By the 1880s, a significant movement in English architectural taste had turned away from the Italianate stucco style, which was increasingly associated with the somewhat threadbare gentility of the suburbs built a generation earlier, towards a new vocabulary of red brick, terracotta ornament, and eclectic historical detail that drew on a wider range of English historical precedents than the single-minded Italianism of the stucco period.
This new vocabulary — variously described as Queen Anne Revival, Dutch or Flemish Renaissance, or simply as the red brick style — was popularised by architects like Richard Norman Shaw, J. J. Stevenson, and their contemporaries, who found in the vernacular building traditions of late seventeenth-century England a formal vocabulary that was simultaneously English in character and classical in its underlying discipline. Shaw's buildings on Pont Street in Knightsbridge, which gave the style its ironic journalistic label of 'Pont Street Dutch', demonstrated that red brick and stepped gables could produce architecture of the first order when handled by an architect of genius.
The Queen Anne Revival buildings that appeared in Belsize Park from the 1880s onwards represent the application of this aesthetic to the residential development of a neighbourhood that had been largely built in the earlier style. They stand in immediate visual contrast to the stucco terraces that surround them — darker, redder, more textured, with a greater variety of detail and a more complex roofline. The contrast between the two generations of development gives the neighbourhood its architectural richness, the visual variety that makes walking through Belsize Park a more rewarding experience than the undifferentiated stucco development of some comparable Victorian suburbs.
Red Brick and Respectability
The association of red brick with respectability in the late Victorian period was partly a reaction against the perceived cheapness of stucco — the argument that real stone buildings were the mark of genuine architectural quality, and that the stucco facing of brick walls was a form of architectural dishonesty. The red brick buildings of the Queen Anne Revival claimed to be what they were: brick buildings, making no pretence to be something else. The honesty of exposed brick construction was a value that connected to the broader Arts and Crafts commitment to truth to materials and to the rejection of architectural falseness.
This argument was not entirely convincing — red brick had its own formal limitations, and the Queen Anne Revival architects used their own forms of applied ornament and historical quotation — but it had sufficient force to shift the preferred idiom of upper-middle-class residential development from stucco to brick in the last two decades of the Victorian period. The result was a generation of red brick buildings of considerable quality scattered through the streets of Belsize Park and the surrounding neighbourhood, representing the aesthetic preferences of a class that was simultaneously more confident and more self-consciously English in its cultural identity than the generation that had built the stucco terraces.
Notable Examples
The Queen Anne Revival and related styles are represented in Belsize Park by a number of buildings of genuine architectural quality. The large red brick mansion blocks that began to appear in the neighbourhood in the 1880s and 1890s — precursors of the Edwardian mansion flats that would transform the neighbourhood in the early twentieth century — combined the aesthetic of the new red brick style with the practical advantages of multiple occupancy. The individual houses built in Queen Anne Revival style in the streets around the main development represent a more personal expression of the aesthetic — buildings in which individual architects (rather than speculative builders) had more scope to develop the formal language in response to specific site conditions and client requirements.
The terracotta ornament that is characteristic of the red brick style is one of its most visually engaging elements. Where the stucco tradition used moulded cement render for its ornamental details, the Queen Anne Revival used fired terracotta — a more durable material that could be produced in complex shapes and that developed a distinctive appearance as it weathered. The terracotta ornament of the Belsize Park red brick buildings — the panels of foliate decoration, the moulded string courses, the elaborate capitals and keystones — is one of the rewards of close attention to the neighbourhood's architectural fabric.
The Transition to Edwardian
The red brick revolution of the 1880s and 1890s prepared the ground for the Edwardian development of the early twentieth century, which continued and extended the preference for exposed brick construction while introducing new formal elements — the Arts and Crafts vernacular, the Baroque exuberance of the grand mansion blocks, the proto-modernism of some of the more progressive Edwardian architects. The architectural continuity between the late Victorian red brick style and the Edwardian buildings that followed it is one of the threads that gives Belsize Park's architectural evolution its coherent narrative.
The red brick buildings of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, taken together, represent a significant architectural achievement — a collection of buildings of consistently high quality, expressing the aesthetic values and social aspirations of a remarkable period of English cultural history. Their maintenance and conservation, in the context of the Belsize Park Conservation Area, is one of the neighbourhood's ongoing responsibilities. The red brick tradition that began as a reaction against the stucco generation has itself become part of the heritage that the neighbourhood values and is committed to protecting.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*