Not poor or lowly

Which is the finest 18th-century building in England? Not a royal palace, not a library, not a cathedral, but a stable block: that designed by James Paine at Chatsworth. It is a faultless piece of architecture with none of the messiness and compromise of buildings intended for mere human habitation. Perfect in siting, perfect in proportion, perfect in its golden stone execution, it is a masterpiece. Horace Walpole thought the masonry of Chatsworth had the ‘neatness of wrought plate’, but that of Paine’s stables has a poetic, Centaurish magnificence, rippling with five different types of rustication (channelled, striated in two directions, pocked and vermiculated). The carving of the Devonshire arms over the central arch has life-size stone stag supporters with real antlers: a witty indicator of scale.

Nor are the Chatsworth stables unique. Think of William Chamber’s at Good- wood, architecture at least as good as Somerset House; or Carr’s gigantic quadrangle at Wentworth Woodhouse, paid for by the winnings of Whistlejacket, most beautiful of racehorses immortalised by Stubbs (National Gallery); or grandest of the lot, Flitcroft’s unsurpassed pair of quadrangles at Woburn which, when Henry Holland’s riding school was still intact (it should be rebuilt), double-trumped the house itself in both scale and architectural quality.

It is a joke and commonplace that British stables are usually finer than the house; Althorp is only an extreme example. Those handsome quadrangles with arches, pediments, Serlian windows, clock cupolas (or steeples in Scotland) are taken for granted, almost a cliché. Yet they are surprisingly original architectural developments, without parallel elsewhere. The detached, monumental, quadrangular stable was an English theme, unlike the basse cour dependencies of France, or the attached symmetries of Palladio.

The genius of Giles Worsley’s book is to explain why.