The Athenian revolution

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the completion of St Pancras Church, Harry Mount considers the early-19th-century enthusiasm for Greek architecture and its impact on buildings across the British Isles.

- Harry Mount

SOME 200 years ago, Euston Square in north London began a miraculous transformation into a corner of ancient Greece. The change began between 1819 and 1822 when St Pancras Church was built for the huge sum of £76,679. It was the most expensive church to be built in the capital since St Paul’s Cathedral a century earlier and had a capacity of 2,500 and the latest technology in underfloor heating. It’s architectural detailing, however, was largely drawn from ancient buildings in Athens.

The Tower of the Winds, a water clock and weathervane built in 50BC, for example, inspired the church steeple (which was topped by a Corinthian capital, removed in 1953). From the Erechtheum, built on the Acropolis in about 400BC, the church porch borrows not only the vast Ionic capitals that dignify the portico (Fig 1), but also the groups of caryatids that guard the transepts. The St Pancras caryatids (Fig 6) are different from the originals in that they carry water jugs and extinguished, inverted torches, symbols of mortality, to show they preside over burial vaults. They are also a little chunkier—their mid-section was cut out when sculptor Charles Rossi realised they were too tall for their architectural setting.