A nice piece looking at the impact of foreign cultures on British architecture. As well as India and China it features a section on Egyptian influences:
The peculiarly British openness to new fashions meshed happily with the colonial hunger for new possessions. Thus, Egyptian motifs became popular after Nelson won the Battle of the Nile against Napoleon's navy in 1798.
More than ten years later, in Maria Edgeworth's novel The Absentee (1812), Egyptian themes were still all the rage. An early professional interior decorator, Mr Soho, advises Lady Clonbrony, who is married to a dreary Irish peer, to deck out her ballroom in the prevailing fashion. "If your la'ship prefers it, you can have the Egyptian hieroglyphic paper," he says, "with the ibis border to match! The only objection is, one sees it everywhere - quite antediluvian - gone to the hotels even."
The Egyptian style lasted long into the 19th century, accounting for one of Britain's strangest terraces. On Richmond Avenue in Islington, north London, the handsome villas are guarded by a quirky set of sphinxes and obelisks. The sphinxes stare across the road at Tony Blair's old home in Richmond Crescent - the one that Cherie Blair is so cross at having sold for £615,000 in 1997. (Even after the recent fall in house prices, it is still worth £1.8m.) So great was Nelson's fame that these lovely little sphinxes and obelisks were inscribed with the word "Nile" in 1841, 43 years after the battle, by Joseph Kay, surveyor for Islington's Thornhill Estate.
See the above page for the full story.
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