Rickards, Edwin Alfred

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Rickards, Edwin Alfred (1872–1920). English architect. He formed a partnership (1896) with Henry Vaughan Lanchester (1863–1953) and James Stewart (1860–1904), and, as Lanchester, Stewart, & Rickards, entered a number of competitions, as a result of which they built the new City Hall and Law Courts, Cardiff, Wales (from 1898), the first planned civic-centre in Great Britain, with buildings in an exuberant Edwardian Baroque style with sculptures by Henry Poole (1873–1928), who also collaborated with the partnership on Deptford Town Hall, London (1908), again Baroque, but leaning towards C17 Anglo-Dutch work of the time of Wren. After Stewart's death Lanchester & Rickards won the competition to design the Wesleyan Central Convocation Hall, Westminster (1907), one of the finest monuments of the Edwardian era in England. A contemporary critic referred to Rickards's work as ‘combining opulence and taste with a touch of refined swagger’, and that describes his work to perfection.

Bibliography

A. S. Gray (1985);
J. Newman (1995);
Service (ed.) (1975); Se (1977);
Jane Turner (1996)