The architect who startled Georgian London

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

William Daniell’s view of the new London Bridge around 1800, as proposed by his friend George Dance the Younger (1741–1825), shows not one but two bridges, a pair of handsome parallel structures marching across the Thames, 100 or so yards apart. Each boasts a drawbridge to allow unimpeded progress for every kind of craft on the river, even those with tall masts. On the north bank, traffic pours into a crescent-shaped piazza, dominated by Wren’s Monument at the centre, while to the south, a mirror-image piazza boasts at its centre an immense Egyptian obelisk. This is the epitome of grand European urbanism, a confident theatre from which the Port of London could strut its commercial superiority, to vie with Napoleon’s Paris. Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde, in their classic account London as it might have been (1982), considered it ‘the most dazzling of all London’s unfulfilled dreams’.

Dance died 200 years ago this month. If John Nash is the best-known name among Georgian architect-planners, Dance deserves to be celebrated widely, for all that few of his more ambitious schemes were built.

Dance spent six years in Italy from 1759–65, studying architecture and draughtsmanship. During much of that time he was accompanied by his older brother, the painter (and later politician) Nathaniel. Having returned to London, in 1768 Dance succeeded his father as Clerk of the City Works, a weighty post which was essentially that of City architect. George Dance the Elder, who had started out as a mason, had held the position for 33 years, and had designed the commanding, classical Mansion House for the Lord Mayor.

While the Dance household-office included several architectural pupils, the garrulous (often unreliable) painter and diarist Joseph Farington recorded that one, John Soane, was more servant than pupil. Whatever the truth, the gauche bricklayer’s son from the Thames Valley gained valuable insights from the sociable, talented Dance family, not least into the advantages of patronage. For young Dance, the City of London – by then almost a family business – was to be his springboard. Starting his career with the self-effacing little church All Hallows-on-the-Wall (1765–67), Dance brought a personal reading of classical architecture to the site on the extremity of the City. He rebuilt the ruined church, awkwardly located alongside sections of the Roman and medieval walls, with a barrel vault and lunette windows, unapologetically breaking and simplifying the conventions of classical ornament. Next, he startled London with Newgate Prison, a massive Piranesian structure, furiously expressive of ‘the drama of retributive justice’, as the architectural historian Howard Colvin so acutely put it. After serious damage inflicted during the Gordon Riots of 1780, the prison was largely rebuilt; Dance enlisted Soane to work with him on the reconstruction (later, when Soane was appointed architect to the Bank of England in 1788, he turned to Dance for help with the design of the Bank Stock Office).

The south front of the Guildhall designed by George Dance the Younger and built in 1788–89, in a drawing from 1804 made for Soane’s Royal Academy lectures. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama; © Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

Dance’s pleasant personality and early success seem to have left him notably generous, even unambitious, in an adversarial profession. As well as being an accomplished and prolific portraitist, he enjoyed drawing caricatures (100 or so of his humorous sketches are in the collection of the Royal Academy); perhaps he found it more expedient to save his sharper personal opinions for the sketchpad. But in architecture, too, he could strike a light note. His most celebratory statement in the City of London, and one which survives, is the south front of the Guildhall, the elevation enlivened by scalloped arches, turrets and other effervescent details taken from his friend William Hodges’ engravings of India.

Dance was one of the first few architect members of the Royal Academy, and was appointed Professor of Architecture in 1798. He held the position for six years, but never delivered a lecture. Watching the situation closely, Soane swiftly stepped into his shoes. Dance’s relaxed approach to work, however, seems to have exacerbated Soane’s stony misery at his own relative lack of public commissions. It can’t have helped that in 1806 Dance became the joint architect of the headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons on Lincoln’s Inn Fields – which could be seen under construction from the windows of Soane’s house-office across the square.

In those years tensions around their professional lives drove a wedge between the two architects. Yet on the sudden death of Soane’s wife, Eliza, in 1815, nobody came faster to his side than 74-year-old George Dance. Later in life, and by then honoured with a knighthood, Soane came to accept the crucial part that the older architect had played in his life. In 1836, a decade after Dance’s death, his son Charles wrote to Soane to offer him his father’s drawings. For £500 Soane purchased an elegant mahogany plan chest that the Dance family knew as ‘the shrine’. It now stands in the North Drawing Room on the first floor of Soane’s house-museum, marking his indebtedness to his master and mentor.

George Dance left his mark in sometimes surprising ways. Alfred Place, just east of Tottenham Court Road in central London, was recently redesigned to become a well-used and delightfully landscaped public space. It is bookended by two arcs, south and north, which are noticeable but always seem slightly inexplicable. It emerges that the relatively recent buildings that shadow those curves preserve the memory of Dance’s scheme, as if carefully following his actual marks on paper. Other schemes such as that around St George’s Circus in Southwark, laid out for the Bridge House Committee, have left traces and, further afield, his Theatre Royal in Bath survives.

Dance was a visionary town planner, yet the powerful men of the City of London and the Port of London were not the patrons he deserved. In the great London Bridge scheme, he had combined the fluid forms of crescent and circus, after the example of John Wood in Bath. Adding the determined thrust of major thoroughfares and river crossings, George Dance conjured up a pulsing urbanity, a thrilling engine house for the capital. The riverside warehouses were built later but the full project, it was said, fell foul of scheming private interests. It was ever thus.

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.