Private Practice
In 1837 a programme of budget cuts at the Admiralty led to Taylor's dismissal. He took up general practice, and qualified as a district surveyor. In 1838 he began the spectacular Gothick tower at Hadlow Castle, a late eighteenth century house in Kent. The tower was based in part on James Wyatt's at Fonthill Abbey. It was built of brick rendered in Roman cement to imitate stone, the finer architectural detail built up with the cement. He had previously used the Gothick style at a church in Walham Green, Fulham in 1827-8.
He designed, and developed, as flats, the block of buildings on the east side of Trafalgar Square which later became Morley’s Hotel. He received some attention from William IV, and claimed to have persuaded the king that the new open space at Charing Cross should be called "Trafalgar Square" rather than ‘King William the Fourth Square", as originally proposed.
In 1843–8 he laid out large parts of the Bishop of London's estate, Westbourne Terrace (where he built a house for himself), Chester Place, and parts of Hyde Park Square and Gloucester Square. Around 1851, Taylor designed William Batty's Grand National Hippodrome, also known as Batty's Hippodrome, a 14,000 person open-air arena near Kensington Gardens and the Crystal Palace Exhibition.
Taylor was the architect and joint surveyor to the Regent's Canal Railway Company, which, in 1845, proposed to fill in the Regent's Canal between Paddington and Limehouse and use its route for a railway. In 1849 he undertook the continuation of the North Kent railway from Stroud, through Chatham, and Canterbury to Dover, but the negotiations fell through, at a personal loss to Taylor of £3,000.
After this he abandoned architecture for archæology. In 1856 he revisited Italy with his wife, and stayed at Rome from November 1857 to March 1858, collecting materials for The Stones of Etruria and Marbles of Antient Rome, which he published in 1859. He finally returned to England in 1868, and in 1870–2 published a collection of sketches and descriptions of buildings which he had visited during his travels, under the title of The Auto-Biography of an Octogenarian Architect.
Taylor died at Broadstairs on 1 May 1873.
Read more about this topic: George Ledwell Taylor
Famous quotes containing the words private and/or practice:
“There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)