Welsh Journals

industrial protest which point in the opposite direction-the support given by south Wales miners to the Penrhyn quarrymen and vice versa in the first decade of this century and again in the 1980s being an example traversing geography of Wales, let alone within more narrow confines. Ultimately, then, in a work so challenging and innovative it is disappointing to see cartography so narrowly drawn and a failure to recognize nation as well as community as a conjunction worth exploring in these terms. DAVID EGAN Pontypridd JOHN NASH: ARCHITECT IN WALES PENSAER YNG NGHYMRU. By Richard Suggett. National Library of Wales and Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1995. Pp. 134. £ 9.50 This well-illustrated and scholarly book is very well timed, because the National Trust is busy restoring Llannerchaeron near Aberaeron, a country house attributed to John Nash by contemporary travellers, and its opening to the public over the next few years will cause an upsurge of interest in Nash's work in Wales in the 1780s and 1790s. Nash (1752-1835) was the most celebrated architect of his day, but, although associated with London and Brighton, he had numerous family connections with south Wales, and Dr Suggett's admirable study deals with the mysterious 'lost decade' of his career, Nash arriving at Carmarthen in 1785 as a bankrupt craftsman and contractor (and a divorcee to boot), and returning to London around 1796 or 1797 as an architect poised to take the capital by storm. The reasons for Nash's flight to Carmarthen after his divorce, and his efforts to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, are in themselves a fascinating 'human story', but the book is a careful survey of architecture in the main, not a biography, with chapters on his public architecture (such as the restoration of St David's Cathedral), his gentry villas, his picturesque improvements to gentry estates, such as Nanteos, not forgetting the occasional building designed, later on, by Nash from his London office, such as Rheola near Glynneath, or the occasional oddity such as the Picton Monument at Carmarthen (1827), of which the present surviving obelisk is a feeble replacement and successor. At the end of the book we have also a helpful catalogue of all Nash's work in Wales, including a discussion of works attributed to him on doubtful evidence. Nash's public architecture-prisons, houses of correction, poor houses (a surprising one at Meidrim, for example), bridges-show that this was