Decimus Burton (30 September 1800 – 14 December 1881) was one of the foremost English architects and landscapers of the 19th century. He was the foremost Victorian architect in the Roman Revival, Greek Revival, Georgian neoclassical and Regency styles. He was a founding fellow and vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and from 1840 architect to the Royal Botanic Society, and an early member of the Athenaeum Club, London, whose clubhouse he designed and which the company of his father, James Burton, the pre-eminent Georgian London property developer, built.
Burton's works are Hyde Park, London (including the gate or screen of Hyde Park Corner, the Wellington Arch, and the Gates); Green Park and St James's Park; Regent's Park (including Cornwall Terrace, York Terrace, Clarence Terrace, Chester Terrace, and the villas of the Inner Circle which include his own mansion, The Holme, and the original Winfield House); the enclosure of the forecourt of Buckingham Palace from which he had Nash's Marble Arch moved; the clubhouse of the Athenaeum Club, London; Carlton House Terrace; Spring Gardens in St. James's; and the Palm House and the Temperate House at Kew Gardens. Burton designed the seaside towns of St Leonards-on-Sea, Fleetwood, and Folkestone, and also Royal Tunbridge Wells. His Calverley Estate (of which only a small proportion survives) was highly commended.
Burton was a member of London high society during the Georgian era and during the Regency era. He had close friendships with Princess Victoria (the future Queen Victoria); the Duchess of Kent; William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, John Wilson Croker, and Sir Humphry Davy. The Burtons' London mansion, The Holme of Regent's Park, which was built by James's company to a design by his son Decimus Burton, was described by 20th century architectural critic Ian Nairn as 'a definition of Western civilization in a single view'. Burton also contributed to the design of their Tonbridge, Kent mansion, Mabledon.
Decimus was the tenth child of James Burton Senior (1761 – 1837), who was the pre-eminent London property developer, and Elizabeth Westley (12 December 1761 – 14 January 1837), of Loughton, Essex, who was the daughter of John and Mary Westley. His father was born James Haliburton, and shortened his surname to Burton in 1794, between the births of his fourth and fifth children.> His paternal grandfather was William Haliburton (1731–1785), a London property developer of Scottish descent.
On his father's side, Decimus's great-great grandparents were The Rev. James Haliburton (1681–1756) and Margaret Eliott, daughter of Sir William Eliott, 2nd Baronet, and aunt of George Augustus Eliott, 1st Baron Heathfield. Decimus was descended from John Haliburton (1573–1627), from whom Sir Walter Scott was descended on the maternal side. Burton was a cousin of the Canadian author and British MP Thomas Chandler Haliburton: and thereby of the Canada First founder Robert Grant Haliburton and the British civil servant Lord Haliburton, who was the first native Canadian to be raised to the Peerage of the United Kingdom.
Decimus's siblings included the Egyptologist James Burton, and the physician Henry Burton. He was the cousin of Constance Mary Fearon, who was the founder of the Francis Bacon Society.
Education and architectural style
Decimus was born at the 'very comfortable and well staffed' North House in the newly built Southampton Terrace, Bloomsbury, London. From 1805, Decimus was raised in his father's mansion, Mabledon House, in Kent. Subsequent to the birth of his twelfth child, Jessy, in 1804, Decimus's father James Burton had purchased a site on a hill about one mile to the south of Tonbridge in Kent, where he constructed, to the designs of the architect Joseph T. Parkinson, in 1805, the large country mansion which he named Mabledon House, which was described in 1810 by the local authority as 'an elegant imitation of an ancient castellated mansion'. The majority of the stone that James Burton required for Mabledon was quarried from the hill on which it was to be built, but Burton also purchased the stone that had been released by the recent demolition at a nearby mansion, Penshurst Place. Decimus Burton was coincidentally commissioned to expand Mabledon, his childhood home, on several occasions after it had been sold by his father.
Tuition by his father and George Maddox
Decimus first trained with his father and received drawing lessons from George Maddox. Decimus's father James was a talented architect, in addition to the foremost contemporaneous property developer. Williams says of James Burton, "[He] was no ordinary builder. He could have put up an imposing and beautifully proportioned building, correct in every constructional detail, from the roughest of sketches tossed patronizingly at him by a 'gentleman architect'", and "James Burton became adept at relieving the monotony of long residential terraces by allowing their central blocks to project slightly from the surfaces to each side, and by bringing forward, too, the houses at each end", and that "the ironwork in a classical style in James Burton's Bloomsbury terraces was, and often still is, particularly fine, though mass produced".
Samuel Pepys Cockerell, advisor to the Governors of the Foundling Hospital, a contemporary of James Burton, commended James Burton's architectural excellence: Without such a man, possessed of very considerable talents, unwearied industry, and a capital of his own, the extraordinary success of the improvement of the Foundling Estate could not have taken place... By his own peculiar resources of mind, he has succeeded in disposing of his buildings and rents, under all disadvantages of war, and of an unjust clamour which has repeatedly been raised against him. Mr Burton was ready to come forward with money and personal assistance to relieve and help forward those builders who were unable to proceed in their contracts; and in some instances he has been obliged to resume the undertaking and complete himself what has been weakly and imperfectly proceeded with....
In 1815, James Burton took Decimus to Hastings, where the two would later design and build St Leonards-on-Sea and, in 1816, Decimus commenced work in James Burton's office. While working for his father, Decimus was present in the design and construction of lower Regent Street. Simultaneously, Maddox taught Decimus architectural draughtsmanship, including the details of the five orders. After his first year of tuition by his father and Maddox, Decimus submitted to the Royal Academy of Arts a design for a bridge, which was commended by the academy.
Tuition at Royal Academy Schools by John Soane
Burton has been described by Williams as "an exceptionally clever child" who demonstrated a lack of emotion characteristic of his family. Decimus left Tonbridge School in 1816 and entered directly the Royal Academy Schools, in 1817. His contemporaries at the Royal Academy included Sydney Smirke, with whom he would restore Temple Church, London between 1841 and 1843, and William Tite. As a consequence of his father's social position, Burton was able to enter the Schools at an unprecedentedly young age, without having been previously articled to an architect. There he was taught by Sir John Soane, for whom his brother, James, had also worked.
Soane was an advocate of the Neo-Palladian style, but had repudiated, including to his students, Robert Smirke's new Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, which had not been built in proportion: Soane used special diagrams to demonstrate to his students, including Burton, the failings of Smirke's design, as a consequence of which he was ostracized within the Royal Academy and compelled to suspend his lectures. Soane commended, in contradistinction, in 1815, as an archetype of neoclassical excellence, Robert Adam's Kedleston Hall: "In this superb structure he [Adam] has united... the taste and magnificence of a Roman villa with all the comforts and conveniences of an English Nobleman's residence".