People : Thomas Mawson, Garden Designer, Town Planner and Exceptional Landscape Architect.

Thomas Hayton Mawson (5 May 1861 – 14 November 1933), known as T. H. Mawson, was a British garden designer, landscape architect, and town planner.

Personal life

Mawson was born in Nether Wyresdale, Lancashire and left school at age 12. His father, who died in 1877, was a warper in a cotton mill and later started a building business. He married Anna Prentice in 1884 and the Mawsons made their family home in Windermere, Westmorland in 1885. They had four sons and five daughters. His eldest son, Edward Prentice Mawson was a successful landscape architect and took over the running of his father’s firm when his father developed Parkinson’s disease in 1923. Another son, John Mawson, moved to New Zealand in 1928 as Director of Town Planning for that country. He died at Applegarth, Hest Bank, near Lancaster, Lancashire, aged 72 and is buried in Bowness Cemetery within a few miles of some of his best gardens and overlooking Windermere.

Working life

To make a living, he worked first in the building trade in Lancaster, then at a London nursery where he gained experience in landscape gardening. In the 1880s he moved back north, where he and two brothers started the Lakeland Nursery in Windermere. The firm became sufficiently successful for him to be able to turn his attention to garden design.

Mawson’s first commission was a local property, Graythwaite Hall, and his work there showed his hallmark blend of architecture and planting. He went on to design other gardens in Cumbria such as Langdale Chase, Holehird, Brockhole, and Holker Hall around the turn of the century.

In 1891 Mawson was commissioned to design and construct Belle Vue Park in Newport, Monmouthshire, Mawson’s first win in an open competition. His design was, in fact, designed for the neighbouring field, the site of the then Newport and Monmouthshire Hospital after Mawson misunderstood directions on his first visit. The mistake was not realised until the first site visit, after the contract had been awarded. Between 1894 and 1909 Mawson was commissioned to design and construct Dyffryn Gardens near Cardiff. The Rushton Hall estate in Northamptonshire has early 20th century formal terraced gardens designed by Mawson between 1905–1909 and implemented by his brother Robert.

Later Mawson designed gardens in various parts of Britain, and others in Europe and Canada. In London he designed gardens at The Hill, in Hampstead for Lord Leverhulme. The impressive 800 ft long pergola is now open to the public as part of the West Heath. He designed Rivington Gardens and Lever Park in Lancashire also for Lord Leverhulme. Padiham Memorial Park (1921) was another commission in Lancashire. Mawson also designed the gardens at Wood Hall near Cockermouth, Cumbria, which were completed in 1920. Much of this garden still survives today.

From 1910 to 1924 he lectured frequently at the school of civic design, Liverpool University. He also contributed articles on garden design to The Studio magazine and its annual The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art. In the 1920s he designed gardens for Dunira, a country house in Perthshire.

In 1923 he became president of the Town Planning Institute, and in 1929 the first president of the Institute of Landscape Architects.

International work

In 1908 he won a competition to lay out the Peace Palace gardens at The Hague. He also advised on the development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the United States. In 1912 Mawson toured several Canadian cities, beginning in Halifax and ending up in Victoria, British Columbia. As well as giving talks, he proposed several (unaccepted) designs including for Wascana Centre in Regina, Brockton Point lighthouse, Coal Harbour and Lost Lagoon in Vancouver, and urban design plans for Banff and downtown Calgary. Mawson’s vision for Calgary, had it been implemented, would have changed what was then a dusty prairie town, into a city of the City Beautiful movement.

Legacy

With the passage of time some of the original features have deteriorated. A number of Mawson’s parks were restored in the early twenty-first century. For example, the two municipal parks at Stoke-on-Trent (Hanley Park and Burslem Park) and a rose garden at Bushey were restored as part of the “Parks for People” programme for historic parks and cemeteries in the UK.

Archive

More than 14,000 plans and drawings together with 6,500 glass plate negatives and photographs comprise the archive of Mawson documents. They are stored at Kendal Record Office having been offered to the Cumbria Archive Service following the closure of Thomas H. Mawson & Son of Lancaster and Windermere in 1978. As at 2010, the material has not been fully catalogued and conservation is proving difficult.

Selected writings

• 1900: The Art and Craft of Garden Making, 1st edn 1900, 5th edn (recommended), 1926.
• 1908: “The Designing of Gardens”, article in The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art 1908
• 1911: Civic Art Covers the principles of town planning
• 1927: The Life and Work of an English Landscape Architect

 

People : Richard Norman Shaw, Architect, Designer of New Scotland Yard & Phileas Fogg’s Club……

Richard Norman Shaw RA (7 May 1831 – 17 November 1912) was a British architect who worked from the 1870s to the 1900s, known for his country houses and for commercial buildings.

Life

Shaw was born in Edinburgh, and trained in the London office of William Burn with George Edmund Street and attended the Royal Academy classes, receiving a thorough grounding in classicism, and met William Eden Nesfield, with whom he was briefly in partnership. In 1854–1856 he travelled with a Royal Academy scholarship, collecting sketches that were published as Architectural Sketches from the Continent, 1858.

In 1863, after sixteen years of training, he opened a practice for a short time with Nesfield. In 1872, Shaw was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy.

He worked, among others, for the artists John Callcott Horsley and George Henry Boughton, and the industrialist Lord Armstrong. He designed large houses such as Cragside and Grim’s Dyke, as well as a series of commercial buildings in a wide range of styles.

Shaw was elected to the Royal Academy in 1877, and co-edited (with Sir Thomas Jackson RA) the 1892 collection of essays, Architecture, a profession or an Art?. He firmly believed it was an art. In later years, Shaw moved to a heavier classical style which influenced the emerging Edwardian Classicism of the early 20th century. Shaw died in London, where he had designed residential buildings in areas such as Pont Street, and public buildings such as New Scotland Yard.

His picturesque early country houses avoided the current Neo-Gothic and the academic styles, reviving vernacular materials like half timber and hanging tiles, with projecting gables and tall massive chimneys with “inglenooks” for warm seating. The result was free and fresh, not slavishly imitating his Jacobean and vernacular models, yet warmly familiar, a parallel to the Arts and Crafts movement. Richard Norman Shaw’s houses soon attracted the misnomer the “Queen Anne style”. As his powers developed, he dropped some of the mannered detailing, his buildings gained in dignity, and acquired an air of serenity and a quiet homely charm which were less conspicuous in his earlier works; half timber construction was more sparingly used, and finally disappeared entirely.

His work is characterised by ingenious open planning, the Great Hall or “sitting hall” with a staircase running up the side that became familiar in mass-produced housing of the 1890s.

He was also involved in ecclesiastical architecture. He restored St. John’s Church, Leeds and designed new churches such as St. Margaret’s, Ilkley, All Saints’, Leek and All Saints’, Richards Castle.

Shaw died in London on 17 November 1912.

Built work

• 1–2 St. James Street, London, 1882–83
• Glen Andred, at Withyham, Sussex, 1867
• Leyswood, at Withyham, Sussex, 1866–69
• Knight’s Bank, at Farnham, Surrey, 1868 (demolished 1932)
• Cragside, at Rothbury, Northumberland, 1869/1870–1885
• Preen Manor, Shropshire
• Grim’s Dyke, Harrow, London, 1870
• New Zealand Chambers, Leadenhall Street, London, 1871–73
• Pierrepont and Merrist Wood, Surrey
• Lowther Lodge, Kensington, 1873–75, headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society
• 6 Ellerdale Road, Hampstead, London, built for himself
• House of Bethany, St. Clement’s Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, 1874–75
• Wispers, West Sussex, 1874–76
• 8 Melbury Road, Kensington, London, built for painter Marcus Stone, 1872–73
• Woodland House, 31 Melbury Road, Kensington, London, built for painter Luke Fildes, 1876–77
• Pierrepont House, Frensham, 1876–78
• Swan House, 17 Chelsea Embankment, London, 1875–77
• Ellern Mede, 31 Totteridge Common, Barnet, 1877
• Bedford Park, London, the first “garden city” suburban development: housing, including St. Michael and All Angels Church, 1879–82
• Albert Hall Mansions, at Kensington Gore, London, 1879–86
• Tabard Hotel, Chiswick, London
• Adcote, Little Ness, Shropshire, 1876–81
• Flete House, Devonshire
• Greenham Lodge, Berkshire
• Dawpool, Cheshire (demolished, 1920s)
• Bryanston School, Dorset, 1898
• Chesters, Northumberland
• New Scotland Yard, on the Thames Embankment, London, 1887–1906 (built as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, now known as the Norman Shaw Buildings and used as Parliamentary offices)
• Albion House, James Street, Liverpool, 1896–98
• House for Kate Greenaway, Frognal, London, 1885
• Swanscombe Church in Kent
• White Lodge and White Lodge West, Bingley, West Yorkshire
• Bannow, Residential Care Home, St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, 1877
• Claremont School, originally the Ebden family home named Baldslow Place, St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex 1888
• 4 – 6 Page Heath Lane, Bickley, Kent, 1864
• The Corner House, 114 Shortlands Road, Beckenham, Kent, 1869
• 1 St. James’s Street, London, 1904
• Bailiff’s Cottage, Bromley Palace Estate, Bromley, Kent, 1864 (demolished)
• Town Hall, Market Square, Bromley, Kent, 1863 (unexecuted)
• Bradford City Hall extension, 1909
• Holy Trinity Church, Bingley, Yorkshire 1866–68 (demolished 1974)
• Holme Grange School, Wokingham, Berkshire East Sussex 1883
• Flora Fountain, Mumbai, India, 1864
• Highdown School, Emmer Green, Reading, Berkshire, 1878–80
• Alderbrook Park, Cranleigh, Surrey 1881 (house for Pandeli Ralli, demolished 1956)
• Trevanion, Totteridge Lane, Barnet, 1883–84
• Piccadilly Hotel, Piccadilly Circus, London, England, 1905–08; his last work

People : Leonard Stokes, Who Designed Our Telephone Exchanges ? Prolific Art & Crafts Architect, Why Don’t We Know More About Him ?

Leonard Aloysius Scott Stokes (1858 – 25 December 1925) was an English architect.Leonard Stokes was born in Southport (then in Lancashire) in 1858. He trained in London and travelled in Germany and Italy. Most of his designs were for Roman Catholic buildings, including churches, convents and schools. His first outstanding work was the Church of St Clare, Liverpool. He also designed country houses and around 20 telephone exchanges. In 1919 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, having served as their president from 1910 to 1912. Sir Albert Edward Richardson, who later became President of the Royal Society, trained in his offices.

He died in 1925 in Chelsea

People : Edwin Lutyens, Architect of an Era

Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, OM, KCIE, PRA, FRIBA 29 March 1869 – 1 January 1944), was a British architect who is known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era. He designed many English country houses.

He has been referred to as “the greatest British architect” and is known best for having an instrumental role in designing and building a section of the metropolis of Delhi, known as New Delhi, which would later on serve as the seat of the Government of India. In recognition of his contribution, New Delhi is also known as “Lutyens’ Delhi”. In collaboration with Sir Herbert Baker, he was also the main architect of several monuments in New Delhi such as the India Gate; he also designed Viceroy’s House, which is now known as the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Early life

He was born in London and grew up in Thursley, Surrey. He was named after a friend of his father, the painter and sculptor Edwin Henry Landseer. For many years he worked from offices at 29 Bloomsbury Square, London. Lutyens studied architecture at South Kensington School of Art, London from 1885 to 1887. After college he joined the Ernest George and Harold Peto architectural practice. It was here that he first met Sir Herbert Baker.

Private practice

He began his own practice in 1888, his first commission being a private house at Crooksbury, Farnham, Surrey. During this work, he met the garden designer and horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll. In 1896 he began work on a house for Jekyll at Munstead Wood near Godalming, Surrey. It was the beginning of a professional partnership that would define the look of many Lutyens country houses.

The “Lutyens-Jekyll” garden overflowed with hardy shrubbery and herbaceous plantings within a firm classicising architecture of stairs and balustraded terraces. This combined style, of the formal with the informal, exemplified by brick paths, softened by billowing herbaceous borders, full of lilies, lupins, delphiniums and lavender, was in direct contrast to the very formal bedding schemes favoured by the previous generation in the 19th century. This new “natural” style was to define the “English garden” until modern times.

Lutyens’ fame grew largely through the popularity of the new lifestyle magazine Country Life created by Edward Hudson, which featured many of his house designs. Hudson was a great admirer of Lutyens’ style and commissioned Lutyens for a number of projects, including Lindisfarne Castle and the Country Life headquarters building in London, at 8 Tavistock Street. One of his assistants in the 1890s was Maxwell Ayrton.

Works

Initially, his designs were all Arts and Crafts style, a good example being Overstrand Hall Norfolk and Le Bois des Moutiers (1898) in France, but during the early 1900s his work became more classical in style. His commissions were of a varied nature from private houses to two churches for the new Hampstead Garden Suburb in London to Julius Drewe’s Castle Drogo near Drewsteignton in Devon and on to his contributions to India’s new imperial capital, New Delhi, (where he worked as chief architect with Herbert Baker and others). Here he added elements of local architectural styles to his classicism, and based his urbanisation scheme on Mughal water gardens. He also designed the Hyderabad House for the last Nizam of Hyderabad, as his Delhi palace.

He also designed a chalk building, Marsh Court, in Hampshire, England. Built between 1901 and 1905, it is the last of his Tudor designs and was based on a variant of ancient rammed earth building techniques. In 1903 the main school building of Amesbury Prep School in Hindhead, Surrey, was designed and built as a private residence. It is now a Grade 2* listed building of National Significance.

He also designed a Columbarium for the Hannen family in Wargrave.

Before the end of World War I, he was appointed one of three principal architects for the Imperial War Graves Commission (now Commonwealth War Graves Commission) and was involved with the creation of many monuments to commemorate the dead. Larger cemeteries have a Stone of Remembrance, designed by himself. The best known of these monuments are the Cenotaph in Whitehall, Westminster, and the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Thiepval. The Cenotaph was originally commissioned by David Lloyd George as a temporary structure to be the centrepiece of the Allied Victory Parade in 1919. Lloyd George proposed a catafalque, a low empty platform, but it was Lutyens’ idea for the taller monument. The design took less than six hours to complete. Many local war memorials (such as the one at All Saints’, Northampton), Montréal, Toronto, Hamilton (Ontario), Victoria (British Columbia), and Vancouver are Lutyens designs, based on the Cenotaph. So is the war memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney. He also designed the War Memorial Gardens in Dublin, which were restored in the 1990s. Other works include the Tower Hill memorial, and (similar to his later India Gate design) a memorial in Victoria Park in Leicester.

Lutyens also refurbished Lindisfarne Castle for its wealthy owner.

He was knighted in 1918 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy in 1921. In 1924, he was appointed a member of the newly created Royal Fine Art Commission, a position he held until his death.

While work continued in New Delhi, Lutyens continued to receive other commissions including several commercial buildings in London and the British Embassy in Washington, DC.

In 1924 he completed the supervision of the construction of what is perhaps his most popular design: Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. This four-storey Palladian villa was built in 1/12 scale and is now a permanent exhibit in the public area of Windsor Castle. It was not conceived or built as a plaything for children; its goal was to exhibit the finest British craftsmanship of the period.

Lutyens was commissioned in 1929 to design a new Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool. He planned a vast building of brick and granite, topped with towers and a 510-foot dome, with commissioned sculpture work by Charles Sargeant Jagger and W. C. H. King. Work on this magnificent building started in 1933, but was halted during the Second World War. After the war, the project ended due to a shortage of funding, with only the crypt completed. A model of Lutyens’ unrealised building was given to and restored by the Walker Art Gallery in 1975 and is now on display in the Museum of Liverpool. The architect of the present Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, which was built over land adjacent to the crypt and consecrated in 1967, was Sir Frederick Gibberd.

In 1945, a year after his death, A Plan for the City & County of Kingston upon Hull was published. Lutyens worked on the plan with Sir Patrick Abercrombie and they are credited as its co-authors. Abercrombie’s introduction in the plan makes special reference to Lutyens’ contribution. The plan was, however, rejected by the City Council of Hull.

He received the AIA Gold Medal in 1925.

Furniture

Less well known is that Lutyens has also designed furniture. Some of his designs are still on the market today.

New Delhi

Largely designed by Lutyens over twenty or so years (1912 to 1930), New Delhi, situated within the metropolis of Delhi, popularly known as ‘Lutyens’ Delhi’, was chosen to replace Calcutta as the seat of the British Indian government in 1912; the project was completed in 1929 and officially inaugurated in 1931. In undertaking this project, Lutyens invented his own new order of classical architecture, which has become known as the Delhi Order and was used by him for several designs in England, such as Campion Hall, Oxford. Unlike the more traditional British architects who came before him, he was both inspired by and incorporated various features from the local and traditional Indian architecture—something most clearly seen in the great drum-mounted Buddhist dome of Viceroy’s House, now Rashtrapati Bhavan. This palatial building, containing 340 rooms, is built on an area of some 330 acres (1.3 km²) and incorporates a private garden also designed by Lutyens. The building was designed as the official residence of the Viceroy of India and is now the official residence of the President of India.

The Delhi Order columns at the front entrance of the palace have bells carved into them, which, it has been suggested, Lutyens had designed with the idea that as the bells were silent the British rule would never come to an end. At one time, more than 2,000 people were required to care for the building and serve the Viceroy’s household.

The new city contains both the Parliament buildings and government offices (many designed by Herbert Baker) and was built distinctively of the local red sandstone using the traditional Mughal style.

When composing the plans for New Delhi, Lutyens planned for the new city to lie southwest of the walled city of Shahjahanbad. His plans for the city also laid out the street plan for New Delhi consisting of wide tree-lined avenues.

Built in the spirit of British colonial rule, the place where the new imperial city and the older native settlement met was intended to be a market; it was there that Lutyens imagined the Indian traders would participate in “the grand shopping centre for the residents of Shahjahanabad and New Delhi”, thus giving rise to the D-shaped market seen today.

Many of the garden-ringed villas in the Lutyens’ Bungalow Zone (LBZ)—also known as Lutyens’ Delhi—that were part of Lutyens’ original scheme for New Delhi are under threat due to the constant pressure for development in Delhi. The LBZ was placed on the 2002 World Monuments Fund Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites. It should be noted that none of the bungalows in the LBZ were designed by Lutyens—he only designed the four bungalows in the Presidential Estate surrounding Rashtrapati Bhavan at Willingdon Crescent now known as Mother Teresa Crescent. Other buildings in Delhi that Lutyens designed include Baroda House, Bikaner House, Hyderabad House, and Patiala House.

Lutyens was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (KCIE) on 1 January 1930.

A bust of Lutyens in the former Viceroy’s House is the only statue of a Westerner left in its original position in New Delhi. Lutyens’ work in New Delhi is the focus of Robert Grant Irving’s book Indian Summer. In spite of his monumental work in India, Lutyens had views on the peoples of the Indian sub-continent that, although commonly held by those of his class and times, would now be considered racist.

Ireland

Works in Ireland include the Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge in Dublin, which consists of a bridge over the railway and a bridge over the River Liffey (unbuilt) and two tiered sunken gardens; Heywood Gardens, County Laois (open to the public), consisting of a hedge garden, lawns, tiered sunken garden and a belvedere; extensive changes and extensions to Lambay Castle, Lambay Island, near Dublin, consisting of a circular battlement enclosing the restored and extended castle and farm building complex, upgraded cottages and stores near the harbour, a real tennis court, a large guest house (The White House), a boathouse and a chapel; alterations and extensions to Howth Castle, County Dublin; the unbuilt Hugh Lane gallery straddling the River Liffey on the site of the Ha’penny Bridge and the unbuilt Hugh Lane Gallery on the west side of St Stephen’s Green; and Costelloe Lodge at Casla (also known as Costelloe), County Galway (that was used for refuge by J. Bruce Ismay, the Chairman of the White Star Line, following the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic).

Lutyens is thought to have designed Tranarossan House, located just north of Downings on the Rosguill Peninsula on the north coast of County Donegal.

Spain

In Madrid Lutyens’ work can be seen in the interiors of the Liria Palace, a neoclassical building which was severely damaged during the Spanish Civil War. The palace was originally built in the eighteenth century for James FitzJames, 1st Duke of Berwick, and still belongs to his descendants. Lutyens’ reconstruction was commissioned by Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart, 17th Duke of Alba. The Duke had met Lutyens while he was the Spanish ambassador to Great Britain.

Marriage and later life

Two years after she proposed to him and in the face of parental disapproval, Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1874–1964), third daughter of The 1st Earl of Lytton, a former Viceroy of India, and Edith (née) Villiers, married Lutyens on 4 August 1897 at Knebworth, Hertfordshire. They had five children, but the union was largely unsatisfactory, practically from the start. The Lutyens’ marriage quickly deteriorated, with Lady Emily becoming interested in theosophy, Eastern religions and a fascination – emotional and philosophical – with Jiddu Krishnamurti.

The couple’s daughter Elisabeth Lutyens became a well-known composer; another daughter, Mary Lutyens, became a writer known for her books about Krishnamurti. A grandson was Nicholas Ridley, cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher.

Children

• Barbara Lutyens (1898–1981) married 10 May 1920 (as his 2nd wife) Capt. The Rt. Hon. (David) Euan Wallace, MC, MP, PC (1892–1941). (Euan Wallace was first married 1913–1919 to Lady Idina Sackville, and had two sons by her.) Barbara’s third and only surviving son (Wallace and the two older sons died in the Second World War) was Billy Wallace (b. 1927), a former escort of Princess Margaret. Barbara Lutyens married secondly in 1945 Lieutenant Commander Herbert Agar, USNR.
• Robert Lutyens (1901–1971/1972), an architect with his father; he was also an interior designer, journalist and writer. He married twice and had a son by his first marriage and a daughter Candia, a furniture maker, by his second marriage.
• Ursula (1904–1967) married 1924 The 3rd Viscount Ridley, by whom issue included The 4th Viscount Ridley (1925–2012), his brother Nicholas Ridley, Baron Ridley of Liddesdale (1929–1993), the father of Jane Ridley, who has written a biography of Lutyens, and also a daughter.
• Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983); twice married, and had issue, one son and twin daughters by her first husband. By her second husband Edward Clark, she had a son born in 1941 before marriage in 1943.
• Edith Mary Lutyens (1908–1999); married firstly a stockbroker Anthony Rupert Herbert Franklin Sewell. They had issue, one daughter. She married secondly 1945 the art historian and royal furrier J. G. Links (d. 1997).

During the later years of his life, Lutyens suffered with several bouts of pneumonia. In the early 1940s he was diagnosed with cancer. He died on 1 January 1944 and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium where he had designed the Philipson Mausoleum in 1914–1916. His memorial, designed by his friend and fellow architect William Curtis Green, is in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London.

Major buildings and projects

• 1901: Deanery Garden, England
• 1925: British Medical Association, London, England
• 1925: Old City Hall Cenotaph, Toronto, Canada
• 1928: Hyderabad House, New Delhi, India
• 1929: Rashtrapathi Bhavan, New Delhi, India
• 1930: Castle Drogo, Drewsteignton, Devon, England
• 1935: The Midland Bank, Manchester, England

1936: Baroda House, New Delhi, India

People : Herbert Baker, Global Architect Extraordinaire, but Always In Lutyens Shadow ?

Herbert Baker (9 June 1862 – 4 February 1946) was an English architect remembered as the dominant force in South African architecture for two decades. He was born and died at Owletts in Cobham, Kent.

Among the many churches, schools and houses he designed in South Africa are the Union Buildings in Pretoria, St. John’s College, Johannesburg, the Wynberg Boys’ High School, Groote Schuur in Cape Town, and the Champagne Homestead and Rhodes Cottage on Boschendal, between Franschhoek and Stellenbosch. With Edwin Lutyens he was instrumental in designing New Delhi, which in 1931 became the capital of the British Raj. His tomb is in Westminster Abbey.

Life and career

The fourth son of nine children of Thomas Henry Baker and Frances Georgina Davis, Herbert was from the outset exposed to a tradition of good craftsmanship, preserved through isolation in the neighbourhood of his home. As a boy, walking and exploring the historical ruins found in the area were his favourite pastimes. Here he observed and learned to appreciate the time-honoured materials of brick and plaster, and the various aspects of timber use, especially in roof construction—tie-beam and arch-braced collar-beam trusses. He was profoundly influenced by the stone construction used in Norman cathedrals and Anglo-Saxon churches, as well as the ornamentation and symbolism of the Renaissance buildings in Kent. This early influence is apparent in the churches, schools and houses he later designed in South Africa.

He was educated at Tonbridge School. In 1879 he was articled to his cousin Arthur Baker, embarking on the accepted pattern of architectural education comprising three years of apprenticeship and the attending of classes at the Architectural Association School and the Royal Academy Schools. Study tours of Europe were regarded as an essential part of the course. In 1891 Baker passed his examination for Associateship of the Royal Institute of British Architects and was awarded the Ashpitel Prize for being top of his class.

He worked initially for Ernest George and Harold Peto in London from 1882–87, then opened his own office in Gravesend, Kent in 1890. From 1902 – 1913 he developed his career in South Africa. In 1913 he returned to England and began practice in London in partnership with Alexander Scott. Near the end of this most productive phase of his career, Baker received a knighthood, was elected to the Royal Academy, had conferred on him the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1927, and received honorary degrees from Witwatersrand and Oxford Universities. Baker’s autobiography ‘Architecture & Personalities’ was published in 1944.

South Africa

He embarked for South Africa in 1892 ostensibly to visit his brother, and was commissioned in 1893 by Cecil Rhodes to remodel Groote Schuur, Rhodes’ house on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town, and the residence of South African prime ministers. Rhodes sponsored Baker’s further education in Greece, Italy and Egypt, after which he returned to South Africa and stayed the next 20 years.

He had the patronage of Lord Milner, and was invited to the Transvaal to design and build residences for the British colonials. Much taken with the country, and notably with the Cape Dutch homes in the Cape Province, Baker resolved to remain in South Africa and to establish an architectural practice, which went under the name of Herbert Baker, Kendall & Morris. Baker undertook work in widespread parts of the country including Durban, Grahamstown, King William’s Town, Bloemfontein, George and Oudtshoorn, and even further afield in Salisbury, Rhodesia where he designed the Anglican Cathedral and a house for Julius Weil, the general merchant.

In 1902 Baker left his practice at the Cape in the hands of his partner and went to live in Johannesburg, where he built Stonehouse. On a visit to Britain in 1904 he married his cousin, Florence Edmeades, daughter of Gen. Henry Edmund Edmeades, bringing her back to Johannesburg, where two sons, the first of four children, were born. Baker quickly became noted for his work, and was commissioned by a number of the “Randlords” (the wealthy mining magnates of Johannesburg) to design houses, particularly in the suburbs of Parktown and Westcliff. He also designed commercial premises and public buildings.

Some Herbert Baker buildings in South Africa

• St Boniface Church Germiston
• Bishop Bavin School St. George’s
• Bishop’s Lea, George
• Cecil John Rhodes Cottage, Boschendal
• Champagne Homestead, Boschendal
• Dale College Boys’ High School, King William’s Town
• Glenshiel, Johannesburg
• Grey College, Bloemfontein
• Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley, Northern Cape
• McClean telescope building, Royal Observatory, Cape Town
• Michaelhouse, Balgowan, KwaZulu-Natal
• The Outspan, Parktown, Johannesburg
• Pallinghurst, Parktown, Johannesburg
• Northwards, Johannesburg
• Pilrig House, 1 Rockridge Road, Parktown
• Pretoria Station
• Rhodes Memorial, Cape Town. Baker used a design similar to the Greek Temple at Segesta.
• Rhodes University, Grahamstown
• Roedean School, Johannesburg
• Sandown House, Rondebosch, Cape Town. Built for MP John Molteno.
• School House, Bishops Diocesan College, Rondebosch, Cape Town
• South African Institute for Medical Research, Johannesburg
• Andrew’s College, Grahamstown chapel
• St Andrew’s School for Girls, Johannesburg
• St Anne’s College Chapel in Pietermaritzburg
• George’s Cathedral, Cape Town
• John’s College, Johannesburg
• St Margaret’s (1905) Rockridge Road, Parktown
• St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg
• St Michael and All Angels, Observatory, Cape Town
• St Michael and All Angels Anglican Church, Boksburg
• Stone House, Rockridge Road, Parktown. Baker’s own house and the first he built in Johannesburg
• Union Buildings, Pretoria
• Villa Arcadia, Johannesburg
• Workers Village at Lanquedoc, Boschendal
• Welgelegen Manor, Johannesburg
• Wynberg Boys’ High School, Cape Town

Union Buildings, South Africa

In 1909 Herbert Baker was commissioned to design the Government Building of the Union of South Africa (which was formed on 31 May 1910) in Pretoria. Pretoria was to become the administrative centre for the new government. In November 1910 the cornerstone of the Union Building was laid.

Lord Selborne and H. C. Hull, a member of the first Union Cabinet, chose Meintjieskop as the site for Baker’s design. The site was that of a disused quarry and the existing excavations were used to create the amphitheatre, which was set about with ornamental pools, fountains, sculptures, balustrades and trees.

The design consisted of two identical wings, joined by a semicircular colonnade forming the backdrop of the amphitheatre. The colonnade was terminated on either side by a tower. Each wing had a basement and three floors above ground. The interiors were created in the Cape Dutch Style with carved teak fanlights, heavy doors, dark ceiling beams contrasting with white plaster walls and heavy wood furniture. Baker used indigenous materials as far as possible. The granite was quarried on site while Buiskop sandstone was used for the courtyards. Stinkwood and Rhodesian teak were used for timber and wood panelling. The roof tiles and quarry tiles for the floors were made in Vereeniging. The Union Buildings were completed in 1913, after which Herbert Baker left for New Delhi from where he returned home to England.

Rhodes Cottage, Boschendal South Africa

In 1897, Cecil John Rhodes started large scale fruit farming in the Drakenstein Valley and commissioned Sir Herbert Baker to design his country retreat on the farm Nieuwedorp at Boschendal. In contrast to the spectacular mountain views, the brief was to design a simple country cottage combining Cape cottage features and incorporating indigenous yellowwood and stinkwood in the interior. It was intended to accommodate only Rhodes, his secretary and a butler.

The first name recorded in the guestbook was that of Sir Alfred Milner, erstwhile Governor of the Cape Colony and British High Commissioner at the outbreak of the South African War (Boer War). The cottage was later to host the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the Earl of Athlone, former Governor-General of South Africa and his wife Princess Alice, granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

In the 1990s the cottage was revamped and refitted while preserving its character. It stands on Estate 20, one of the Founders’ Estates which form Phase 1 of the residential development of Boschendal.

India

In 1912 Baker went to India to work with Lutyens, and went on to design the Secretariat Building, New Delhi and Parliament House in New Delhi and the bungalows of Members of Parliament. Baker designed the two Secretariat buildings flanking the great axis leading to what was then the Viceroy of India’s Palace, now known as Rashtrapati Bhavan (President’s House).

United Kingdom

Works from 1913 include:

• War Memorial Building, Harrow on the Hill (English Heritage TQ1534987385)
• South Africa House, the South African High Commission building in Trafalgar Square, London
• India House, Aldwych (1925–1930), the Indian High Commission, opened by King George V on 8 July 1930.
• The Port Lympne Mansion (now a zoo) in Kent in south-east England
• One of the grandstands at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London; Baker presented the Marylebone Cricket Club with Old Father Time, a weather vane in the shape of Father Time, which adorned his stand until it was replaced in 1996. The weather vane, now a famous symbol of the home of cricket, was moved to another stand at the ground. He also designed the Grace Gates at Lord’s.
• The North Range of Downing College The design was based on that of the original architect of the college, Williams Wilkins, but ‘changed the original design just enough to annoy’
• Rebuilding of the Bank of England, London, demolishing most of Sir John Soane’s original building. Described by Nikolaus Pevsner in ‘Buildings of England’ as “the greatest architectural crime, in the City of London, of the twentieth century”.
• The War Cloister in Winchester College.
• Rhodes House in Oxford, headquarters of the Rhodes Scholarships.
• Goodenough College, London.
• Busby’s House, Westminster School, situated at 23 Great College Street. The building was erected in 1936.

Belgium

Following the First World War, Baker was approached to assist in the design of suitable monuments to the efforts of British Commonwealth soldiers. Out of this came the design for Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest British war cemetery in the world sited in Passchendaele near Ypres in Belgium, unveiled in July 1927. Baker had earlier designed the war memorial at Winchester College, influences for which he carried over to his work on Tyne Cot.

Kenya

Sir Edward Grigg, Governor of Kenya from 1925 to 1931, invited Baker to visit Kenya in 1925.

Baker wrote: “The Governor and Director of Education were much concerned to provide a healthy education for the European youth under the conditions of the climate. So with their encouragement I designed a school at Nairobi with a crypt as a playground – like the undercroft of Wren’s library at Trinity College, Cambridge, – where the boys could stay at mid-day instead of going home under the vertical rays of the sun. At the larger ‘public school’ at Kabete all the detached classrooms and houses were designed and built with connecting colonnades, in which respect I followed the excellent example set by [United States] President Jefferson in his beautiful University of Virginia.” The use of colonnades accords with advice given to Baker by T. E. Lawrence, who regarded the tropical sun as “an enemy” and told him “All pavements should be covered over with light vaulting.” The foundation stone was laid by Sir Edward Grigg on 24 September 1929, and the Prince of Wales School was opened in 1931 – (the original idea for the name of the school was Kabete Boys Secondary School, but the first headmaster, Captain Bertram W. L. Nicholson,[9] thought this to be too clumsy and therefore the name of The Prince of Wales School was suggested and eventually adopted).

Other impressive buildings in Nairobi designed by Baker and completed with his assistant, Jan Hoogterp, include the Law Courts and Government House (now State House), described as a Palladian mansion. However, the building with the closest resemblance to the Prince of Wales School may well be Baker’s Government House (now State House) near the lighthouse at Ras Serani, Mombasa. Not only has it “large columned loggias”, but it also has an archway, through which can be glimpsed the Indian Ocean, leading Baker to wax poetic: “One can live out between these columns both by day and night in the warm and soft sea air.”

• Prince of Wales School, Nairobi

France

Post the First World War, Baker’s worked on cemeteries in France including:

• Adanac Military Cemetery
• Australian Imperial Force burial ground
• Delville Wood Cemetery and Memorial
• Courcelette Memorial, Canadian war memorial
• Dantzig Alley British Cemetery
• Flatiron Copse Cemetery
• Le Trou Aid Post Cemetery
• London Cemetery and Extension
• Loos Memorial, Loos-en-Gohelle
• Ovillers Military Cemetery
• Quarry Cemetery

Australia

Fairbridge Chapel was built at Pinjarra, Western Australia in 1924 according to Herbert Baker’s design, which he provided free of charge. The farm was started by Kingsley Fairbridge as part of a scheme to help destitute English children improve their lot by emigration to Australia and Canada.

• Fairbridge Church, Pinjarra Western Australia

People : Gertrude Jekyll, Influential Garden Designer and Writer

Gertrude Jekyll ; 29 November 1843—8 December 1932) was an influential British horticulturist, garden designer, artist and writer. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote over 1,000 articles for magazines such as Country Life and William Robinson’s The Garden. Jekyll has been described as “a premier influence in garden design” by English and American gardening enthusiasts.

Early life

Jekyll was born at 2 Grafton Street, Mayfair, London, the fifth of the seven children of Captain Edward Joseph Hill Jekyll, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, and his wife Julia Hammersley. Her younger brother, the Reverend Walter Jekyll, was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who borrowed the family name for his famous novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In 1848 her family left London and moved to Bramley House, Surrey, where she spent her formative years.

Themes

Jekyll was one half of one of the most influential and historical partnerships of the Arts and Crafts movement, thanks to her association with the English architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, for whose projects she created numerous landscapes, and who designed her home Munstead Wood, near Godalming in Surrey. (In 1900, Lutyens and Jekyll’s brother Herbert designed the British Pavilion for the Paris Exposition.)

Jekyll is remembered for her outstanding designs and subtle, painterly approach to the arrangement of the gardens she created, particularly her “hardy flower borders”. Her work is known for its radiant colour and the brush-like strokes of her plantings; it is suggested by some that the Impressionistic-style schemes may have been due to Jekyll’s deteriorating eyesight, which largely put an end to her career as a painter and watercolourist. In works like Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (reprinted 1988) she put her imprint on modern uses of “warm” and “cool” flower colours in gardens.

Jekyll was one of the first of her profession to take into account the colour, texture, and experience of gardens as the prominent authorities in her designs, and she was a lifelong fan of plants of all genres. Her theory of how to design with colour was influenced by painter J.M.W. Turner and by impressionism, and by the theoretical colour wheel. Later in life, Jekyll collected and contributed a vast array of plants solely for the purpose of preservation to numerous institutions across Britain. This pure passion for gardening was started at South Kensington School of Art, where she fell in love with the creative art of planting, and even more specifically, gardening. At the time of her death, she had designed over 400 gardens in Britain, Europe and a few in North America. Jekyll was also known for her prolific writing. She penned over fifteen books, ranging from Wood and Garden and her most famous book Colour in the Flower Garden, to memoirs of her youth. Jekyll did not want to limit her influence to teaching the practice of gardening, but to take it a step further to the quiet study of gardening and the plants themselves. Her concern that plants should be displayed to best effect even when cut for the house, led her to design her own range of glass flower vases.

Jekyll later returned to her childhood home in the village of Bramley, Surrey to design a garden in Snowdenham Lane called Millmead. She was also interested in traditional cottage furnishings and rural crafts, and concerned that they were disappearing. Her book Old West Surrey (1904) records many aspects of 19th-century country life, with over 300 photographs taken by Jekyll.

Upton Grey Manor House

In 1908 Gertrude Jekyll drew plans for a garden at the Manor House in Upton Grey for the magazine editor Charles Holme. It has been restored in recent years. It is on a smaller scale than the majority of her other commissions.

To the west of the house is the Wild garden. Some of Jekyll’s original drifts of daffodils remain at the end of the Wild Garden, still in the drifts she designed.

To the east of the house stands there is the formal garden. Here there are no curved lines, Jekyll designed a Rose Lawn and typical herbaceous borders whose colours run in drifts from cool to hot and the return to cool again. These, with the tennis and bowling lawns are enclosed in yew hedging.

Outside the hedging lies the nuttery, orchard, kitchen garden, stable cottage and cottage beds.

The whole of the garden has been faithfully restored to the many plans and plants that Jekyll prescribed.

Awards

Jekyll was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1897 and the Veitch Memorial Medal of the society in 1929. Also in 1929, she was given the George Robert White Medal of Honor of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

Death

Jekyll is buried in the churchyard of Busbridge Church, formerly known as St. John the Baptist, Busbridge, Godalming, next to her brother and sister-in-law, Sir Herbert Jekyll, KCMG and Lady Agnes Jekyll, DBE. The monument was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Castle Drogo & Gardens Devon : Another Lutyens Vision…..

Castle Drogo is a country house near Drewsteignton, Devon, England. It was built from 1911 and was finished in 1930 for Julius Drewe (businessman and founder of the Home and Colonial Stores) to designs by architect Edwin Lutyens, and is a Grade I listed building. It is currently undergoing a 5 year conservation project to finally make it watertight. Castle Drogo was the last castle to be built in England, and probably the last private house in the country to be built entirely of granite.

Background

Julius Drewe’s first cousin was Richard Peek, the rector of Drewsteignton, named after Drogo de Teigne, and alleged forefather to the Drewes. Julius stayed on several occasions with his cousin and it must have been here that he conceived the idea of building a castle on the home ground of his ancestor. He found an ideal site, and in 1910 he bought about 450 acres (1.8 km²) south and west of the village (By the time of his death in 1931 he had bought up an estate of 1,500 acres). He then went to Edwin Lutyens, one of the most interesting architects of the time, and asked him to build his castle. According to his son Basil, he did so on the advice of Edward Hudson, proprietor of Country Life magazine, who was both a patron and a champion of Lutyens. Drewe was now 54 years old, but he still had time, energy and money to create his new family seat. On 4 April 1911, Drewe’s 55th birthday, the first foundation stone was laid.

Construction

The castle took many years to complete, with the First World War and the economic downturn causing many delays. Castle Drogo was finally completed in 1930, considerably reduced in scale from Lutyens’s 1911 designs, and only a year before Julius died; he had, however, been able to live in the house since around 1925.

Features of the building

The stately home borrows styles of castle building from the medieval and Tudor periods, along with more minimalist contemporary approaches. A notable feature is the encasement of the service staircase, around which the main staircase climbs. Its defensive characteristics are purely decorative. Additionally, the castle had electricity and lifts from the outset, with power being supplied by two turbines on the river below.

Gardens

The castle has a fine formal garden, designed by Lutyens with planting by George Dillistone, which contrasts effectively with its striking setting on the edge of Dartmoor. The garden is noted for its rhododendrons and magnolias, herbaceous borders, rose garden, shrub garden and circular croquet lawn.

Later use

After Julius’s death, his wife Frances and her son Basil continued to live at the castle. During 1939–45, Frances and her daughter Mary ran the house as a home for babies made homeless during the bombings of London.

Frances Drewe died in 1954 and Basil was then joined at Drogo by his son Anthony and his wife. In 1974, Anthony and his son, Dr Christopher Drewe, gave Castle Drogo and 600 acres (2.4 km²) of the surrounding land to the National Trust. It was the first 20th-century property the charity acquired. A new visitor centre with shop and café opened in the summer of 2009, after English Heritage required that industrial kitchen equipment such as that used by the previous café within the house, be removed from Grade I listed buildings. In February 2011, the National Trust launched a public appeal for money to fund necessary restoration work.

Owletts : A Kent Home and Garden Where Jekyll, Lutyens and Baker Hung Out And New Delhi was started to be designed.

Owletts

Owletts, Kent, is a country house 1.3 kilometres (0.8 mi) to the northwest of the village of Cobham, Kent, England.

It is a Grade II* listed building.

History

The house was originally built for Bonham and Elizabeth Hayes, successful farmers in the Cobham area. The red-brick Kentish Yeoman’s house is symmetrical, two storeys high, with sliding sash and dormer windows. The house interiors date in part to 1684, and include a remarkably ornate Carolean plasterwork ceiling above the prinicpal staircase.

The house passed in 1894 to the Edmeades family of Nurstead (also in the parish of Gravesend), then by marriage to the Baker family.

In 1862 the renowned architect Sir Herbert Baker was born here. Owletts became Herbert Baker’s home in later life and he made numerous alterations including the addition of a porch and a wing on the north-west corner of the house. He also removed the wall between the entrance hall and the drawing room and in that room installed an ornamental ‘Empire’ clock. The family filled the house with specially commissioned or collected furniture.

The house has a garden partly designed by Gertrude Jekyll, who was introduced to Baker by Edwin Lutyens (her friend) when he was working with Baker in Ernest George and Harold Peto’s architectural office in London.

Acanthus plants growing in the garden are symbolic of Herbert Baker’s architectural profession. Also within the garden is a bird-bath formed from Tivoli Order variant Corinthian capitals salvaged from the old Bank of England building by John Soane when Sir Herbert rebuilt the Bank (between 1925 and 1939).

When Herbert Baker died at the age of 83 on 4 February 1946 he left Owletts to the National Trust. The National Trust let it out, but some rooms and the garden are regularly open to the public. The current tenant is David Baker and his family; the great-grandson and heir of Sir Herbert Baker.

The house closed in 2011 for a £1 million refit, during which the collection of 900 objects and 1,400 books was carefully packed and stored off-site. It reopened on 7 April 2013.

The garden is tranquil and filled with chickens clucking around which adds to the ambience.