Alfred Waterhouse, RA PRIBA (1830-1905)
Alfred Waterhouse was one of the most important and successful of Victorian architects and designers. He was also admired for his architectural perspectives and landscape watercolours.
Alfred Waterhouse was born in Aigburth, Liverpool, on 19 July 1830, into a comfortable mercantile Quaker family, as the eldest of seven children of the cotton broker, Alfred
Waterhouse, and his wife, Mary (née Bevan). He was educated at the Quaker boarding school, Grove House School, Tottenham (then in Middlesex). He then served an
apprenticeship with Richard Lane and P B Alley, a Quaker practice in Manchester, and many of his own early commissions would be for Quaker relatives and friends. Returning from the first of several Continental tours in 1854, he set up his practice in Manchester, working in a Neo-Gothic style, influenced and admired by John Ruskin.
He established his reputation by winning the prestigious local competitions for the Assize Courts (1859-64) and the Town Hall (1868-77, including its furniture and fittings). In 1860, he married
Elizabeth Hodgkin, the daughter of the Tottenham barrister and Quaker minister, John Hodgkin. They would have three sons and two daughters (the elder of whom married the poet, Robert Bridges).
In 1865, Waterhouse moved to London, and lived and worked at 8 (later 20) New Cavendish Street. The innumerable commissions that followed tested his planning skills and
professionalism, and encouraged him to broaden his stylistic range to take in Romanesque and French Renaissance. He also achieved distinction as a technical pioneer, in employing terracotta on an extensive scale in his work on the Natural History Museum, London (1873-81), and on numerous offices of the Prudential Assurance Company (from 1877). Other major works included churches (he was baptised into the Anglican Church in 1877), country houses and
institutional buildings.
Exhibiting designs and landscape watercolours regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts, Waterhouse was elected an associate, in 1878, and full Royal Academician, in 1885. He was awarded a Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects (1878), and a decade later was elected its President (1888-1891). He was also a founder member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and a life trustee of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
In 1878, Waterhouse bought an estate at Yattendon, Berkshire, and designed its house, Yattendon Court (which has since been destroyed). He died there on 22 August 1905.
His work is represented in the collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the V&A.
Further reading:
Colin Cunningham and Prudence Waterhouse: Alfred Waterhouse: Biography of a Practice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992;
Colin Cunningham, ‘Waterhouse, Alfred (1830-1905)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2010,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36758;
Colin Cunningham, ‘Waterhouse, Alfred (b Aigburth, Liverpool, July 19, 1830; d Yattendon, Berks, Aug 22, 1905)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 2003, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T090810
