Cheltenham's overlooked genius

A drawing by John Buonarotti Papworth

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John Buonarotti Papworth is not to be found in most listings of British architecture's First Eleven but it's sometimes difficult to understand why he's not more well known.

He was a distinguished architect in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and such a whizz at drawing that his contemporaries compared him to Michelangelo (hence his adopted second name).

Among other things, he became architect to the king of Württemberg, an influence on Schinkel, the designer of a model new town on the Ohio river and the planner of the Montpellier and Lansdowne estates in Cheltenham. My first visit has fired an interest in the town and its heyday; Papworth and his contemporaries have become a mild obsession.

Cheltenham's popularity began in the late 1780s when George III spent a few weeks there taking the waters. They didn't cure his porphyria, but his stay made the town fashionable and, over the next 50 years, everyone in society stayed in Cheltenhan from Jane Austen to the Duke of Wellington, Byron to the young Princess Victoria.

All these visitors needed accommodation and, by the 1820s, Papworth and his contemporaries were busily building terraces, crescents and squares as accommodation for an elegant and transient summer society. In his two estates, Papworth designed one of the first garden suburbs, with terraces and villas set amid greenery.

The approaches of Papworth and his colleagues were rather different from those of their near contemporaries like Playfair and Gillespie Graham in Edinburgh New Town, who worked to a series of grand town plans, with nature carefully contained in formal gardens. In Cheltenham, the springs were scattered, so a landowner lucky enough to find the mineral-rich water bubbling up on his property would develop his estate round his source.

As a result, the place acquired an episodic country town character in which splendid Regency set-pieces jostle each other round the greens and little parks.  For instance, Royal Crescent, designed by Charles Harcourt Masters in 1805, was closed off by G.A.Underwood's Harward's Buildings, built a couple of decades later with a fine front but a Mary Anne back onto which the crescent looks.

Both Edinburgh New Town and Cheltenham are elegant, but the Scottish city has a chaste, rather stern Presbyterian flavour while, in Gloucestershire, architects were more frivolous. They had an almost Rococo taste for jolly and eclectic details and embraced a wider range of sources than most of the Scottish architects. Greek as well as Italian; Egyptian was popular after the Battle of the Nile; Gothick was revived in the 1830s.

And the Cheltenham group was adventurous in exploring new materials. Many architects were experts in papier-mache interior decoration and almost all were fond of working with iron, which crops up in all sorts of guises. Delicately pierced cast-iron plates act as sun and privacy screens; wrought iron filigrees delineate the private space of balconies that are gentle projections of the interior into the public realm.

Nothing could be more different from the cheerful gentility of Cheltenham's heyday than what happened to the town in the twentieth century. After fashion moved on in the 1840s, the town became a retirement refuge for Indian army officers and colonial civil servants and so retained a certain polish – until the car arrived.

One-way traffic systems were ruthlessly imposed. Large areas of (mostly) working class Regency housing were demolished to make way for parking. Cheltenham has almost as many mysterious disastrous open spaces as Palermo – and rumour has it that they were created for similar reasons – though now the council is of course above suspicion. Key elements of nineteenth century compositions fell into decay. In some places, the town continues to look as if it was bombed in the Second War and never properly repaired.

Where replacements were inserted, they often seem to have been designed to completely contradict Regency grace and delicacy. Precast concrete and crude scraped Classicism were the rules for new building into the '70s and '80s. Attempts to blend with the existing were (and are) almost universally disastrous, so clumsy that they would be laughable if they were not tragic.

Of late, matters have improved somewhat. Two decrepit houses in Royal Crescent have been restored, remaking the composition, and there is talk of moving the bus station that at present takes up most of the Crescent's gardens. The town's civic society indefatigably castigates proposed horrors and encourages decent improvements.

But something more radical is needed: if Cheltenham is to stem the steady automobile erosion, it needs to keep cars out of the centre and organise proper parking on the perimeter. Perhaps the solution would be the kind of drosjes (shared taxis) they have in Turkey. Time for Cheltenham to twin with Bursa? How Papworth would have gloried in such a rich source of new motifs.