TY - JOUR T1 - From Arcadia to Euston Square: a historical perspective on the RCGP’s new headquarters JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 591 LP - 593 DO - 10.3399/bjgp12X658340 VL - 62 IS - 604 AU - David Heath Y1 - 2012/11/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/62/604/591.abstract N2 - 30 Euston Square was acquired by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP)in 2010 to become its new headquarters following the sale of the woefully overfull Princes Gate. Sensitive repairs have already been carried out to the main Portland Stone elevations, and works of internal alteration and repair are now (September 2012) nearing completion.The building, whose external elevations are in a Greek Revival style, is generally agreed to be a major work by Arthur Beresford Pite (1861–1934). Pite was an exceptionally interesting figure, an educator as well as a practicing architect. He was Professor of Architecture at the Royal College of Art from 1900–1923. Although he worked elsewhere in a number of styles, he made the deliberate choice here to use an archaic Ionic order derived from the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae. This temple to the god of healing and the sun was built towards the middle of the 5th century BC in the lonely heights of the Arcadian mountains, and the ruins are now a World Heritage Site. It was a site visited and explored by the architect CR Cockerell as a young man in 1812–13, and the order was used by him on the Ashmolean Museum and Taylorian Institute in 1839–40, though he did not get around to publishing his investigations until 1860, just before his death in 1863.As A Stuart Gray wrote in 1985, 30 Euston Square was: ‘The first and only scholarly building in London in the Greek style since the work of CR Cockerell. It is, however, more “Pite“ than Cockerell, and more “Cockerell” than Greek.’1906–1908 contract drawings for the first phase of 30 Euston Square.RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collections.So why did Pite do it? In the early years of the 20th century the argument that the … ER -