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Cockerell’s Carlton Club

Charles Robert Cockerell is best known for designing both the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and its Cambridge equivalent, the Fitzwilliam Museum. He is also, alongside William Henry Playfair, responsible for the twelve-columned National Monument that sits atop Calton Hill in Edinburgh — allegedly unfinished, though there is considerable debate over whether this is so. It’s not widely known, however, that the famous architect Cockerell completed a design for a new home for the Carlton Club on Pall Mall in London.

Originally Cockerell had declined the opportunity to submit a design, with such lofty names as Pugin, Wyatt, Barry, and Decimus Burton also declining the offer. A few years later, Cockerell nonetheless worked on this design for the Tory gentlemen’s club, which is superior to that conceived by another architect which was eventually built. Cockerell devised a “lofty Corinthian colonnade of seven bays” according to the Survey of London. “The columns have plain shafts, their capitals are linked by a background frieze of rich festoons, and the Baroque bracketed entablature is surmounted by an open balustrade with solid dies supporting urns and gesticulating statues.”

The inclusion of two bow-fronted protrusions on the ground floor is unfortunate, as they break the unity of the façade and puncture too greatly the general range of depth. The design was influenced by that of the Conservative Club around the corner in St. James but, as the Survey points out, “Cockerell, with his virtuosic eclecticism, has translated a platitude into splendid rhetoric”.

Cockerell’s composition was ignored, and the façade actually constructed proved dissatisfactory to the club members, who had the building’s exterior completely overhauled in the 1910s. After suffering bomb damage during the Second World War, the Club abandoned the site and moved to the smaller club building previously known as Arthur’s, where it continues to this day.

Published at 8:09 am on Monday 3 May 2010. Categories: Architecture Featured Great Britain Tags: , , , .
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