But in these unquiet years, when the world was briefly trying to live at peace with Napoleon, Nash sensed the Regent’s ambition to embellish London in a way to rival the Emperor’s plans for Paris. He therefore projected a street which should proceed, much as had been proposed even before this, along the line where the residential West End began, northward from the Regent’s residence at Carlton House to the southern entrance of the new park. An early scheme for such a street, entirely lined with colonnades and interrupted by squares in which public structures would stand in splendid isolation, suggests his original aim of emulating the Rue de Rivoli and Parisian monuments like the Madeleine and the Bourse. As the project was gradually adjusted to the realities of the situation, most of its geometric regularity and practically all of its Parisian character disappeared. The colonnades survived only along the Quadrant leading out of Piccadilly Circus; the Duke of York’s Column in Waterloo Place, rising between the two blocks of Carlton House Terrace, which eventually replaced Carlton House, is the one feature of Napoleonic scale and character. It is not by Nash but by the Duke of York’s favourite architect, Benjamin Dean Wyatt (1775-?1850), and was built only in 1831-4. Instead of an imitation of Paris, something vastly more original was created, an example of civic design whose full implications are perhaps not wholly digested even today. Nash, the former partner of the landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818), in his new Regent Street as well as in his Regent’s Park and its surrounding terraces, sought to carry out, not with natural scenery but with urban scenery, the principles of Picturesque landscaping. Yet his architectural vocabulary remained well within the accepted range of Romantic Classicism. Waterloo Place is wholly formal, serving as a sort of forecourt to Carlton House when it was laid out in 1815. But going up Lower Regent Street the separate buildings erected in 1817-19 were separately designed, to a harmonious scale but with no over-all regularity of shape and size. At Piccadilly, first the Circus, also of 1817-19, a circular place, and then the Quadrant of 1819-20 took care most ingeniously of a drastic leftward shift in axis. A relatively monumental façade, that of the County Fire Office, faced the head of Lower Regent Street; the other façades of the Circus were regular and plain in an almost Soanic way (Plate 30). The Quadrant gained great distinction from its projecting colonnades of Doric columns (made of cast iron) and from the skilful placing of a domed pavilion opposite its western end.