Blomfield, Sir Reginald Theodore

Blomfield, Sir Reginald Theodore (1856–1942). Cousin of C. J. Blomfield, he entered the office of his uncle, Sir Arthur Blomfield, in 1881. Two years later he set up his own London practice, began writing and drawing for publication, and was involved in the founding of the Art-Workers' Guild. He designed 51 and 53 Frognal, Hampstead, the Talbot Building at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (1910–15), the former United Universities Club of 1906 (known as his Champs-Élysées style) at the corner of Suffolk Street and Pall Mall East, and the Regent Street Quadrant and part of Piccadilly Circus of 1910–23. Other works were war cemeteries and the Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium (1926). His writings include The Formal Garden in England (1892); A History of Renaissance Architecture in England, 1500–1800 (1897), a source-book for the Wrenaissance and Georgian Revival; A History of French Architecture, 1494–1661 and 1661–1774 (1911 and 1921); and Memoirs of an Architect (1932). He published a scathing and witty attack on the fashionable International Modernism then being promoted by the Architectural Review: it was called, appropriately, Modernismus (1934). He also wrote elegantly on Vauban (1938) and Norman Shaw (1940). His garden designs owed much to French and Dutch formality, and his work was the antithesis of the styles promoted by Jekyll and Robinson.

Bibliography

Blomfield (1892, 1897, 1932, 1934, 1938, 1940, 1974);
Fellows (1985);
A. S. Gray (1985);
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)