The original inventors in any age I must always be few. To produce good architecture generally, their inventions should be learnt and thoroughly understood by ordinary builders and workmen, so that they become part of their traditions and habits. The old system of apprenticeship accomplished this. Failing this, we are dependent on the modern system of architects directing the building to its minutest details by means of drawings, which presupposes that all architects are original inventors. If they .are, this age is richer in originality than any previous one. The condition of modern architecture does not bear out this supposition. — J. J. Stevenson, Home Architecture

Introduction

According to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century architectural history, Stevenson and E. R. Robson (1835-1917) introduced elements of what later developed into the Queen Anne style when they built non-gothic brick schools following the Education Act of 1870.

In 1871 Stevenson, like Shaw a Scot out to make a London reputation, built a new house for himself in what is now Bayswater Road. This he named the Red House, like Morris's at Bexley Heath of a decade earlier, in order to call attention to the fact that its brickwork was not covered with stucco but exposed like that of the Thackeray and Howard houses in Palace Green. In fact, however, it was built like the Board Schools of brownish stock bricks with red-brick detail elaborately moulded, gauged, and cut in the Late Stuart way. Although Stevenson's house had little of the real elegance of Kinmel or the natural ease of Shaw's manors, its novelty and its fairly conspicuous location would have attracted attention in any case. But Stevenson, a very accomplished publicist, saw the advantage of proclaiming for this hybrid mode a name, 'Queen Anne', which evidently no less applicable to Nesfield's Kew lodge and Kinmel or even to his friend Robson's schools. Thus was a revival formally launched.

Nonetheless, as soon as Richard Norman Shaw adopted the style in 1872, it became his, and it was was Shaw and not Stevenson who was chiefly responsible for the later dominance of the style often known as Pont Street Dutch.

Architectural Works

Other Works in the Visual Arts

Writings

Related Material

Bibliography

Croot, Patricia E. C., ed. "Settlement and Building: From 1865 to 1900." A History of the County of Middlesex, Vol. 12: Chelsea (2004), pp.66-78. Viewed 12 June 2008.

Durant, David N. The Handbook of British Architectural Styles. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1992.

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963.

Jones, Edward, & Christopher Woodward. A Guide to the Architecture of London. 2nd ed. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1992

Stevenson, J. J. House Architecture. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1880.

Turnor, Reginald. Nineteenth-Century Architecture in Britain. London: Batsford, 1950.

Weinreb, Ben and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan, rev. ed. 1992.

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Last modified 19 July 2017