The total scope of the Regent’s Park development provided a ‘New Town’ in a rather complete sense inspired possibly by Ledoux’s ‘Ville Idéale’. There were detached villas in the park, mews behind the terraces, a market-place to the east, modest two-storey houses near by in Munster Square and, finally, the two Park Villages, carried out by his protégé Sir James Pennethorne (1801-71) after Nash’s ideas from 1827 on. These last are extensions of the Picturesque hamlet, consisting of groups of semi-detached villas some of Italianate, some of Tudoresque character, loosely strung along curving roads, which provide the very prototype of the later-nineteenth-century suburb. To most of his professional contemporaries, and not least to his associates on the Board of the Office of Works, Soane and Smirke, Nash seemed an opportunist and almost a charlatan. He differed as markedly from the archaeologically-minded Smirke as from Soane, even if he was as ready to borrow Greek orders from the one as incised detail from the other. Despite the independent stylistic position of Soane and of Nash, Britain could hardly have produced a line of archaeologist-architects from James Stuart to C. R. Cockerell—a line at least as distinguished as the French line from Leroy to Hittorff—without developing by this time Greek Revival doctrines quite as rigid and as self-assured as those of France and Germany. From the end of the second decade of the century the Grecian mode was, indeed, rather more firmly entrenched in Great Britain than anywhere on the Continent. The historical importance of Wilkins’s Downing College at Cambridge has already been noted. If Wilkins was never able to complete this, so that it remained but a fragment of an ideal Grecian college, he had greater opportunities later in London, opportunities which on the whole he muffed. His University College of 1827-8 in Gower Street impressed contemporaries because its central temple portico ran to _ten_ columns in width. It is not otherwise distinguished, and the advancing wings of the quadrangle are not by him. His St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, of the same date, is a much more modest building (Plate 31). Yet it already shows some of the restlessness, if little of the elaboration, of later Grecian work on the Continent, such as Klenze’s Hermitage Museum in Petersburg. The hospital, although the theme of the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus is ingeniously exploited, lacks the delicacy and elegance of Decimus Burton’s Ionic screen of 1825 across the way (Plate 31).