Alfred Waterhouse

Alfred Waterhouse 1830-1905, English architect. He won competitions for the Manchester assize court (1859) and the Manchester city hall (1868). This work placed him in the forefront of the Victorian Gothic revival. His most important work, the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, in a modified Romanesque style, was notable for its revival of the use of terra-cotta. Waterhouse also executed important buildings for Balliol College, Oxford; Pembroke College, Cambridge; Prudential Assurance Company, Holborn, London; and the City and Guilds College, South Kensington (1881).

Waterhouse, Alfred (1830–1905). English architect. A master of rational planning, he made his reputation as the designer of several important secular buildings, starting with the Gothic Revival Assize Courts, Manchester (demolished), which he won in competition (1858–9), and gained the approbation of Ruskin. He consolidated his position by almost winning the competition to design the Royal Courts of Justice, London (1866–7—the buildings were erected to designs by Street), and by his success in the competition (1867–8) to design the brilliantly planned Gothic Revival Town Hall in Manchester (1869–77). Waterhouse designed numerous university buildings including the Master's Lodge and Broad-Street Front, Balliol College, Oxford (1866–9—Gothic Revival), the French Renaissance Revival Tree Court, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1868–70), and the Gothic Owen's College (now the University), Manchester (1869–88). Interested in experimentation, he used hard terracottas, bricks, and faïences, as in the Natural History Museum, London (1873–81—much influenced by German (especially Rhineland) Romanesque architecture), the Gothic Prudential Assurance Building, Holborn, London (1878–1906), and the Free Rundbogenstil Congregationalist Churches at Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead (1883), and King's Weigh House, Duke Street, Mayfair, London (1889–91). His National Liberal Club, London (1885–7), was in a mixture of Romanesque and Italian and French Renaissance styles, said at the time to reflect the uneasy pot-pourri of disparate opinions within the Liberal Party. The spectacular Eaton Hall, Cheshire (1870–83), seat of the Dukes of Westminster, was demolished in 1961, and was his largest country-house. He also designed the Tudor Revival Blackmoor House and Gothic Revival Church, Blackmoor, Hants. (1868–72). His son, Paul (1861–1924), studied with him, became his partner in 1891, completed his father's University College Hospital, Gower Street, London, and added the Medical School and Nurses' Home (1905). Paul Waterhouse's other works included the Whitworth Hall, University of Manchester (1902) and New Buildings, College Road, University of Leeds (1907–8). Paul Waterhouse was succeeded in the practice by his son, Michael (1889–1968).

Bibliography

Axon (1878);
C. Cunningham (2001);
C. Cunningham & and Waterhouse (1992);
D&M (1985);
Eastlake (1970);
J. Fawcett (ed.) (1976);
Girouard (1990);
A. S. Gray (1985);
Hitchcock (1977);
Maltby et al . (1983);
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004);
Placzek (ed.) (1982);
Sheppard (ed.) (1975);
Jane Turner (1996);
Waterhouse (1867)

Gothic Revival. There is some truth in the suggestion that Gothic architecture in Britain never entirely died out, especially in the hands of local craftsmen in remote, rural areas. Certainly, even during the 17th and early 18th cents., a period dominated by classicism, the style had major patrons such as John Cosin, bishop of Durham between 1660 and 1672; and both Wren and Hawksmoor sometimes adopted it, although almost invariably for works intended to blend in with existing structures, as with the latter architect's additions to All Souls College, Oxford, begun 1715.

Thus, it is not until the mid-18th cent. that we have the first really self-conscious revival of Gothic, when, for example, Horace Walpole (1717–97) began to enlarge his villa, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (near London), during the 1750s, and the amateur architect Sanderson Miller (1717–80) remodelled Lacock abbey (Wilts.) (1754–5). Arbury Hall (War.) (altered from about 1750 by Henry Keene) is another early example of the ‘Gothic’ taste. This architecture often seems whimsical, an intellectually fashionable alternative to Palladianism, although ‘Gothick’ buildings often retained Palladian proportions and soon many leading architects, such as James Wyatt (1748–1817), designed in both styles.

‘Gothic’ was at first an essentially literary movement, inspired by the new interest in medieval and Elizabethan poetry and the increasingly antiquarian spirit of the time. Later in the century, the Gothic Revival, always more English than British, became associated with Romantic ideas of the Sublime and Picturesque. For the eccentric millionaire William Beckford, Wyatt built the gigantic, rambling Fonthill abbey (Wilts.), from 1796 (now demolished). The Picturesque movement encouraged this asymmetry in architecture and its greater integration with landscape. Gothic was often combined with castellated forms and merged into the ‘Tudor-Gothic’ of the early 19th cent.

By this time, however, the fanatical medievalist Augustus Pugin (1812–52) gave the revival a new moral and stylistic authority through his writings and designs. A Roman catholic, he argued that Gothic was truthful and Christian: a comprehensive English national style. His ideas coincided with the upsurge of church building after the catholic emancipation act of 1829 and influenced many Anglicans associated with the Oxford movement. John Ruskin (1819–1900) was also a great champion of the Gothic Revival, and the ‘high Victorian’ period (c.1850–80) saw its widespread adoption for large public buildings and monuments in the growing cities and towns. Examples include Manchester town hall (by Alfred Waterhouse, 1869–77) and, in London, the Midland hotel, St Pancras station (by G. G. Scott, 1865–71), the Law Courts, Strand (by G. E. Street, 1874–82), and the Albert Memorial (again by Scott, begun 1863). In church architecture, the revival continued until at least the early 20th cent.

T. E. Faulkner