At first sight, David Valinsky's subtitle might seem surprising. After all, it was Edward Schroder Prior himself who in 1884 proposed the name for the Art Workers' Guild (44). Here was an architect who actively participated not only in the Arts and Crafts Movement as such, but in a range of other related groups, from the Society of Antiquaries to the SPAB (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings), and who, moreover, became Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge in 1912, a position he kept for two decades, until his death in 1932. Besides, for many architectural historians, Prior's early twentieth-century church, St Andrew, Roker (1905-07), showcases all that was best in the applied and decorative arts of his time. Yet Valinsky goes on to argue that, while participating in the main design current of his age, Prior in some ways stood outside it, remaining very much his own man, with his own opinions, which in some general respects placed him in the very vanguard of the modern age. The key to understanding his work is not that he adopted this style or the other, but rather that this is precisely what he refused to do: he approached each commission on its own merits, accommodating the needs and wishes of the individual or body that had entrusted him with it. As a result, one great virtue of this comprehensive and very handsomely illustrated study lies in its detailed study of each project. But it was not that Prior lacked a wider vision. It is clear from his writings and teachings not only that he thought deeply about his subject, but that his vision was one that transcended narrow, predetermined rules.
As the fourth son among a family of eleven siblings, receiving his early education at the small boarding school set up by his widowed mother, Prior had from the very beginning to establish his own identity within a large network of relationships. After completing his schooldays at Harrow, from 1870 he had the benefit of studying at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, where an extraordinarily varied architectural feast awaited him: Caius Chapel alone was a lesson in the history of architecture: he arrived just after Alfred Waterhouse had finished extending and refurbishing the medieval structure, while Charles Cockerell's library building was just across Senate House Passage from Caius Court. Prior's interest in the medieval period had already been whetted by the enthusiasm for it of Brooke Foss Westcott, who had been his and his brother Charles's housemaster at Harrow, and became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1870. Apparently to the detriment of his studies and sporting interests, the young student filled his notebooks with a range of architectural sketches (including one of Cockerell's Library), and was now clearly moving towards his own future as an architect.
Photograph of Tree Court, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, c. 1870 when Prior went up. Click on this and the following images for more information.
In the second of his 21 chapters, about Prior's pupillage, Valinsky gives us a wonderful sense of the creative buzz he experienced when he joined Richard Norman Shaw's office in Bloomsbury in 1874. This was a veritable seedbed of future architectural trends, fascinating to read about in close detail. Here Prior was exposed to new waves of thought: competition to the Gothic Revival was provided by the growing vogue for the Queen Anne style; a trip to Flanders introduced him to the possibility of using Flemish motifs; the potential for decorative plasterwork caught his attention; and perhaps above all there was the example of Norman Shaw's own originality of approach. A trainee in his office was never going to fit any one mould. As Valinsky put it, "experiment was to become fundamental to the conception of artistic creation" (23). Considering the variety of formative influences on him at this time, from Norman Shaw himself to Philip Webb (curiously, Valinsky points out, never mentioned by him in print), J.J. Stevenson, and Basil Champneys, it is no surprise that Prior should have emerged as an independent thinker and practitioner. This is the time too when Prior became interested in the vernacular, and in Morris's drive to preserve old buildings: SPAB was founded in 1877, while Prior was still in Shaw's office. Not that he was an unthinking disciple of any one of these programmes or initiatives. Valinsky notes, for example, that much in Prior's later work would have been completely opposed to Webb's "processes and results" (24). In any given case, he would always be ready to challenge prevailing practices.
Left: Detail of Quay Terrace, Bridport. Right: High Grove, Eastcote. Photographs © David Valinsky.
Shaw comes out of this study very well indeed. Encouraging as ever, he gave Prior his first commission, Carr Manor at Meanwood in Yorkshire, and the young architect began working on his own account close to Shaw's office in Bloomsbury in 1879. His early works, documented in detail in the next few chapters, with plans, engravings, and photographs taken with Valinsky's professional eye, both as a photographer and architectural historian, are a treat to explore. Many and various they were too, a number in Harrow and nearby Eastcote, where in 1880-81 he completely rebuilt the fire-ravaged High Grove House in an attractive take on the Queen Anne style. But he also received early commissions in Dorset, where he had family connections: Quay Terrace on the harbour at Bridport's West Bay in 1884-85, lodging houses and a hotel there too, and Holy Trinity (New) Church, Bothenhampton (1884-89), a forerunner of the much-fêted St Andrew, Roker, of 1905-07, in Sunderland. Further afield, in Ireland, there was a hosiery factory, long gone now.
To the later 1880s, when he was working on the church at Bothenhampton, belongs the Henry Martyn Hall, Cambridge (1885-7) as well. There were a couple of church restorations in this decade too, including that of the church of St Mary and St Peter, Church Lane, Kelsale-cum-Carlton, Suffolk, where he designed a rather extraordinary lych gate a "fantastical, anthropomorphic creation, recalling Baba Yoga's hut" (101), surely justifying (though Valinsky doesn't say so) his association with the Rogue Goths.
Left: Henry Martyn Hall, Cambridge, photograph © David Valinsky. Right: Lych Gate, St Mary and St Peter, Kelsale-cum-Carlton, photograph © Robert Edwards.
The next few chapters deal with all aspects of Prior's architectural output, ranging from his later works in Harrow to detailed appraisals of his biggest projects, like the impressive (former) Medical School at Cambridge (designed in 1899, and the focus of chapter 6), to more general topics like texture (chapter 8, in which Valinsky looks at Prior's advocacy of expressiveness of surface) and architectural modelling (chapter 12, in which he discusses the impact of an architectural model that Prior showed at the Royal Academy in 1895). There are certainly some surprises here. One is that his first major work, the Medical School, should have been fundamentally classical. Yet Valinsky has already traced some classical features in his earlier designs — St Michael's Court on a corner of Trinity Street and Rose Crescent in central Cambridge, for instance, a project only known now from photographs. This design choice was also related to Prior's critical stance on the Gothic Revival. His admiration for the Gothic itself never waned: as Valinsky explains, his A History of Gothic Art in England (1900) was "the culmination of eight years of travel, study, and writing" (161); what he opposed was the copying of it — an exercise which, with some justification, he saw as futile, and (with much less justification) already firmly in the past. Most important of all, here was a major institution to which classical elements could contribute gravitas and presence.
Left: Contract drawing for the first-floor of the Medical School, Cambridge, with its "Operative Surgery," lecture-theatre, library etc., from the Cambridge University Archive. Right: The former Medical School in Cambridge now, © the present author.
Another unexpected development in this first dozen chapters comes in chapter 11, in Prior's successful experimentation with methods of production and tinting in stained glass, the fruit of which was the invention of an interestingly uneven slab glass, actually called "Prior's Glass." His interest probably went back to his student days: he may well have attended Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt's lectures on mosaic, stained glass and so on at Cambridge in 1871, while he was a student. Prior's windows were not pictorial, but still very distinctive. Typical in their textured appearance, those installed at St Mary's, Burton Bradstock, a medieval church in Dorset very successfully rebuilt by Prior in the late 1890s, rely on "'white' glass and abstract straight-line geometry" for their effect (Valinsky 111). Still, their uniqueness in other respects raises a question: could it be that Christopher Whall, who designed a pictorial window for the nave of St. Mary's, had a say in these "'white' glass windows" too? If so, that would have been typical of Prior as well, in its own way: he believed firmly in collaboration, going against the ethos of the Arts and Crafts Movement in his wish to "break up the architect's design monopoly" (96) at a time when the architect was expected to be a hands-on participant in every aspect of his work. Close scrutiny and thoughtful discussions like this give Valinsky's study its integrity: every detail may be worth exploring, even if definitive answers cannot be found.
Prior's Early English Glass at St. Andrew's, Roker. Photograph © Alec Hamilton.
Naturally, much space is given to Prior's other well-known works, such as the Barn at Exmouth (1895-97), the commission for which seems to have resulted from the success of the architectural model shown at the Royal Academy in 1895. Of the following chapters, the one on Voewood (16), is liberating in its criticism of the building's usual "butterfly" label: Valinsky feels that this favours an appreciation of its form over the principles behind it, and qualities like space, light and colour, in this way simplifying and detracting from the nature of Prior's larger and very successful experiment here. The chapter on St Andrew (17) is equally eloquent in his praise, and again avoids facile categorisation. Having analysed various factors, including the use of reinforced steel, iron and concrete, Valinsky feels that all of them contribute to the church's "uncanny timelessness" (196).
The entrance front of Voewood. Photograph © David Valinsky.
For many, the detailed discussions of Prior's already acknowledged masterpieces, with plans and photographs, will be the most enjoyable parts of the book. But the other chapters on his built legacy are also well worth reading closely. He had no time for housing developments as such, or even for garden suburbs; while he felt that an architecture needed to serve the community, standardisation was inimical to him. But individual houses like those discussed in chapter 18, including Dysart House in Cambridge, The Small House near Chichester, and the lovely Greystones in Highcliffe, Dorset, were all "resolutely a-stylistic" (199) and pleasingly distinctive, while being "eminently liveable" (210), and his suggestions in the following chapter on "Homes and Gardens," for modestly-sized outdoor adjuncts to residential properties, is refreshingly in tune with modern conditions. More photographs would have been welcome in the chapter on gardens, but no doubt the two garden plans here are the most authentic guide to what he had in mind. In his last works too, there was no diminution in his originality, and it was interesting to see in chapter 20 that St Osmund's, Parkstone in Dorset (1913-15, while he was Slade Professor in Cambridge), has Prior's Glass with a further refinement, a whole range of streaky colours adding to their interest.
The west rose window at St Osmund's, with its "flickering dancing light" (Valinsky 228). Photograph © David Valisky
So what do we take away from this very enjoyable and informative book? When he died in 1932, had the energetic and forthright Prior done more for our architectural heritage than leave the rather limited number of buildings listed in Valinsky's catalogue of his works? Interspersed among the chapters on the buildings themselves are others dealing in more depth with his ideas and hopes for the future — his teaching and writing and their legacy; and the whole of his lecture on "Texture as a Quality of Art and a Condition of Architecture" is given in an appendix. Like the chapters on his early years and training, taken together Valinsky's discussions of these give a rich and complex picture of the ideas about architecture that were in the air at that time, bringing in all the influential thinkers of the period (Pugin, George Gilbert Scott, Ruskin, Morris and others), and showing where Prior stood in relation to them. He emerges, perhaps most clearly in Chapter 13 ("Ideas for a Future Architecture"), as an architect who wanted not one style or the other — or indeed any other — but instead "an architecture of experiment and invention that exhibited dignity, simplicity, energy and morality and that was, fundamentally, alive" (133). This proposal, as Valinsky himself points out, "had nothing to say about what architecture should look like," dealing instead with the "experimental and communal spirit in which it should be made" (132). It was his closest contemporaries and friends, William Lethaby and C.F.A. Voysey, who articulated and/or realised ideas to which others could actually give shape. Nevertheless, his various works, in their very uniqueness, along with his eagerness to experiment with form and materials, and to enlist others in the process - all these were inspirational. In this perceptive, wide-ranging book, illustrated with survey, design, contract and construction drawings as well as many photographs, Valinsky succeeds in convincing us that Prior's oeuvre indeed heralded a new age in this fascinating, ever-evolving profession.
Related Material
Bibliography
Valinsky, David. The Architecture and Writings of E. S. Prior: Challenging the Arts and Crafts. London: Lund Humphries, 2026. 272 pp. £49.99. ISBN: 978-1848227224
Created 23 September 2026
Last modified 28 September 2026