Stuck on stucco

Whenever the words ‘stucco house’ appear in the newspapers, you can be certain the occupiers have been up to no good. The Russian kleptocrat in his stucco palace in Mayfair. The shamefaced prime minister seeking refuge in the stucco mansion of a party-donor chum. The disgraced wife-throttler with a stucco terrace in Eaton Square. In each case, it is miscreant stucco, offshore-trust stucco, stucco hiding corruption and foul play behind whiter-than-white, butter-wouldn’t-melt façades.

Almost from the moment the first stucco suburbs — Belgravia, Pimlico, Bayswater, Paddington, Notting Hill, North Kensington — went up in the 19th century, modelled more or less devotedly on John Nash’s Regent’s Park scheme, ‘Stuccovia’, as it was called, was treated with suspicion and sometimes derision. Those runs of piano-key houses were too smooth, too bourgeois, too bland, too samey, too suburban. This, when any street west of Marble Arch was thought to be the outer reaches of civilised London.