Edwin Rickards, in partnership with H.V. Lanchester, designed four of the most astonishing and flamboyant public buildings of late Victorian and Edwardian England. His work has been described as ‘the champagne’ of architecture, perpetually fizzing – like its designer – with an almost ecstatic joy and incorporating some of the finest examples of the New Sculpture. Although Rickards said little about his work in his short lifetime, the impression he made on his contemporaries and on his closest friend, the prolific writer Arnold Bennett, was indelible.
This talk describes his career, the partnership’s town hall designs for Cardiff and Deptford, the little known Hull School of Art and by contrast their Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, which has one of the finest staircases in England. Rickards’ influences were mostly French and Viennese, but the synthesis between them was entirely his and never subsequently repeated by any other architect. It is illustrated by Rickard’s own drawings and by a set of new photographs by Robin Forster taken especially for the latest Victorian Society monograph.
Timothy Brittain-Catlin is an architect and architectural historian who has been teaching for many years. After more than a decade working in Britain and abroad on both historic buildings and masterplanning, he returned to Cambridge in 2000 to research the buildings of A.W.N. Pugin and the domestic architecture of early Victorian England. His book The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century was published in 2008 and since then he has published widely on houses and churches, as well as critiques in the Architectural Review, Architecture Today and many other magazines and journals. In 2020 he published The Edwardians and their Houses, the first radical appraisal of the subject for 40 years. He is a member of Historic England’s national Advisory Committee.
All attendees will be sent a recording of the talk.
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Image: Deptford Town Hall (c) Robin Forster
