The Diorama

Occasionally I come across a book on my shelves (Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is one) in which I have written my name followed by my first address in London: ‘18 Park Square East, NW1.’ None of my subsequent addresses appear in books of a later era so I evidently relished that particular topographic association. I can understand why. Number 18, Park Square East, was where I started to look at the world afresh.

The terrace of Park Square East, on the south-east corner of Regent’s Park, is part of John Nash’s development of Regency London that rolls north from Regent Street in a wave of neoclassical white stucco. It was built in 1823 and features in an engraving of 1829 by Thomas Shepherd. 

Number 18 is the centrepiece of the terrace, taller and grander than its neighbours. From the outside, even in the 1980s, it looked the kind of place in which nobs in top hats and high collars still lived. Inside it was an ark of artists and chancers who had squatted the empty building in the late 1970s and formed an arts cooperative, using its rooms as studios and performance spaces. Through a textbook example of serendipity this new arrival in London was invited to come aboard.

The building’s public face was doubly deceptive. When the terrace was built the individual dwellings were sold off as façades only. You could build whatever you wanted behind them, spending as much or as little as you cared to. Behind the conventional Georgian frontage of 18 Park Square East there were no drawing rooms and grand staircases, as you might have assumed. Instead the artist and architect Augustus Charles Pugin created a revolutionary type of theatre – a forerunner of the cinema – that was purpose-built to show off a new type of light-and-picture show. 

The man who commissioned this structure, and invented this new form of visual entertainment, was a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, a theatrical set designer who would go on to produce one of the earliest types of photograph, known as Daguerrotypes. Daguerre named the building The Diorama, after a similar theatre he had opened the year before in Paris. 

In the Shepherd engraving the name DIORAMA appears in bold capital letters across the pediment of number 18 Park Square East, and it reappeared on that pediment during my first year living in the Diorama when a fellow member of the arts cooperative, working from the Shepherd print, made a replica of the original lettering and stuck it up there (where it remains).  

A show at the Regent’s Park Diorama consisted of two vast canvases – usually a landscape and an interior – that by means of clever use of lighting and other special effects would appear in three dimensions and proceed to change as the show progressed. The audience would sit in a darkened circular auditorium known as the spectatory that would rotate between the screens as, for example, ‘The Effect of Fog and Snow Seen Through a Gothic Colonnade’ was demonstrated on one canvas while the other, ‘Interior of Canterbury Cathedral’ perhaps, was being prepared for the next set of illusions. 

The Regent’s Park Diorama was a shortlived success and over the 170 years since its construction the unwieldy building had been many things, including a Baptist chapel, a hydrotherapy clinic, and an annexe of Bedford College, University of London. Latterly its owners, the Crown Estates, had been thinking of turning it in to yet another office block (at a time when Centre Point, just a mile away, had become a byword for greedy and unnecessary development). While they dithered squatters had moved in and fanned out into its dusty nooks. 

Pugin’s original brick shell, which on a site plan resembled an arrowhead fused with a circle, was pretty much intact but within it there was little left of Daguerre’s Diorama. The most substantial remnant was the circular glass ceiling of the ‘spectatory’ in which the audience had once rotated – or rather the semi-circular glass ceiling, for at some stage it had been cut in half. 

Beneath it a science laboratory had been installed during the building’s days as part of Bedford College. And it was in this old lab, complete with a bench of bunsen burners that we used as the kitchen worktop, that I absorbed by osmosis a certain way of seeing that I have been exercising ever since.