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 and civil parish in the Cheshire East district, in Cheshire, England; it is located south-west of Manchester, north-west of Macclesfield and south-east of Warrington. The population of the parish at the 2021 Uni ...

Cheshire Cheshire ( ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in North West England. It is bordered by Merseyside to the north-west, Greater Manchester to the north-east, Derbyshire to the east, Staffordshire to the south-east, and Shrop ...

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 and the metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. It had an estimated population of in . Greater Manchester is the third-most populous metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2.92&nbs ...

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, ...

'' 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'' (195 ...

and Edward Hubbard 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 ...

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 combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century It ...

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman E ...

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

fenestration Fenestration or fenestrate may refer to: * Fenestration (architecture), relating to openings in a building * Fenestra, in anatomy, medicine, and biology, any small opening in an anatomical structure * Leaf window, or fenestration, a translucent or ...

. The authors of the later edition of the ''

Buildings of England The ''Pevsner Architectural Guides'' are four series of guide books to the architecture of the British Isles. ''The Buildings of England'' series was begun in 1945 by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, with its forty-six original volumes pub ...

'' 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 – 12 October 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 proponen ...

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 Macd ...

References

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

Biography

Practice

Appraisal

See also

References