Richard Harding Watt (1842–1913) was an English designer who worked with four professional architects to create large houses and associated buildings in the town of

Knutsford Knutsford () is a market town in the borough of Cheshire East, in Cheshire, England. Knutsford is south-west of Manchester, north-west of Macclesfield and 12.5 miles (20 km) south-east of Warrington. The population at the 2011 Census wa ...

Cheshire Cheshire ( ) is a ceremonial and historic county in North West England, bordered by Wales to the west, Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, and Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south. Cheshire's county t ...

Biography

Watt travelled widely and sketched many buildings. In 1864 he travelled to Australia, where his sketches were published in nine volumes. Returning to England, he planned to train as an art teacher, but instead became a glove merchant in

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

Practice

Watt designed some buildings himself, but usually used four architects to execute his plans, namely Walter Aston, John Brooke, Harry S. Fairhurst, and William Longworth. In 1898 Watt bought a tannery on Drury Lane, to the north of the town centre, and with Fairhurst, adapted the buildings into a laundry and cottages. One of Watt's other buildings. the King's Coffee House and Gaskell Memorial Tower, is located in the centre of the town, and his series of more eccentric houses were built 1900–1907, stretching along Legh Road, to the southeast of the town. Watt lived in one of these, The Round House, until 1913.

Appraisal

The author of a citation in the ''

National Heritage List for England The National Heritage List for England (NHLE) is England's official database of protected heritage assets. It includes details of all English listed buildings, scheduled monuments, register of historic parks and gardens, protected shipwrecks, an ...

'' describes the Knutsford houses as "a series of eccentric buildings which are of considerable interest and importance" which "transformed the townscape of Knutsford". The architectural historians

Nikolaus Pevsner Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (1 ...

and

Edward Hubbard Edward Horton Hubbard (2 July 1937 – 31 May 1989) was an English architectural historian who worked with Nikolaus Pevsner in compiling volumes of the ''Buildings of England''. He also wrote the definitive biography of John Douglas, and played ...

state that "any

Royal Fine Art Commission The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) was an executive non-departmental public body of the UK government, established in 1999. It was funded by both the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for C ...

now would veto such monstrous desecration of a small and pleasant country town". Yet they accept that younger critics might dub him "the Gaudí of England". They describe his motifs as a mixture of Classical,

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style drew its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian R ...

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

, and "Unprecedented", and comment on his liking for towers with a jagged outline, domes, and random

fenestration Fenestration may refer to: * Fenestration (architecture), the design, construction, or presence of openings in a building * Used in relation to fenestra in anatomy, medicine and biology * Fenestration, holes in the rudder of a ship to reduce the w ...

. The authors of the later edition of the ''

Buildings of England The Pevsner Architectural Guides are a series of guide books to the architecture of Great Britain and Ireland. Begun in the 1940s by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the 46 volumes of the original Buildings of England series were published b ...

'' series refer to "his penchant for scrounging bits of demolished buildings and putting them together in novel and exotic-looking ways". However they express the opinion that some of his works equate to those of

Edgar Wood Edgar Wood (17 May 1860 – 1935) was a British architect, artist and draftsman who practised from Manchester at the turn of the 20th century and gained a considerable reputation in the United Kingdom. He was regarded as a proponent of the A ...

and

Charles Rennie Mackintosh Charles Rennie Mackintosh (7 June 1868 – 10 December 1928) was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. His artistic approach had much in common with European Symbolism. His work, alongside that of his wife Margaret Macdo ...

References

Citations Sources * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Watt, Richard Harding 1842 births 1913 deaths English designers Knutsford 19th-century English businesspeople

Biography

Practice

Appraisal

See also

References