The Strand Block
Sir William Chambers (1723 to 1796) · 1776 to 1780
Stand across the road on the Strand and look at the long stone front with its nine bays, its rusticated arches at street level and its columns and pediment above. This is the public face of Somerset House and the first part of the building that Chambers completed. The three central arches lead into a vaulted vestibule with Doric columns, and through it you glimpse the courtyard beyond. The design is deliberately restrained, closer to the palaces of Paris than to the exuberant Baroque of Wren, and it was meant to show that the British state could build with taste.
Look up at the sculpture. Above the arches are keystones carved with the heads of ocean deities and the rivers of Britain, and along the parapet stand statues of figures representing the continents and the virtues of government. The carving was shared among the leading sculptors of the day, including Joseph Wilton, Agostino Carlini and Giuseppe Ceracchi, at a time when the Royal Academy had just been founded and its first rooms were in this very block. The Academy's schools, library and exhibition room occupied the north range until eighteen thirty seven, and the ceiling paintings by Angelica Kauffman and Benjamin West that once decorated them are now at Burlington House.
The Strand Block replaced a Tudor palace built by the Duke of Somerset in the fifteen forties, which had later been a residence for queens of England and had fallen into ruin. Chambers demolished it and began his new building in seventeen seventy six, the year the American colonies declared independence. It took twenty years and was finished only after his death.
Did You Know? The Royal Academy of Arts held its first exhibitions in this block, and Turner and Constable both studied in its schools here.
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