Alfred Waterhouse (19 July 1830 – 22 August 1905) was an English architect, particularly associated with Gothic Revival architecture, although he designed using other architectural styles as well. He is perhaps best known for his designs for Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London. He designed other town halls, the Manchester Assize buildings—bombed in World War II—and the adjacent Strangeways Prison. He also designed several hospitals, the most architecturally interesting being the Royal Infirmary Liverpool and University College Hospital London. He was particularly active in designing buildings for universities, including both Oxford and Cambridge but also what became Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds universities. He designed many country houses, the most important being Eaton Hall in Cheshire. He designed several bank buildings and offices for insurance companies, most notably the Prudential Assurance Company. Although not a major church designer he produced several notable churches and chapels.
Waterhouse was probably the most financially successful of all Victorian architects. He designed some of the most expensive buildings of the Victorian age. The three most costly were Manchester Town Hall, Eaton Hall and the Natural History Museum; they were also among the largest buildings of their type built during the period.
Waterhouse had a reputation for being able to plan logically laid out buildings, often on awkward or cramped sites. He created soundly constructed buildings, having built up a well structured and organised architectural office, and used reliable sub-contractors and suppliers. His versatility in style also attracted clients. Though expert within Neo-Gothic, Renaissance Revival and Romanesque Revival styles, Waterhouse never limited himself to a single architectural style. He often used eclecticism in his buildings. Styles that he used occasionally include Tudor revival, Jacobethan, Italianate, and some only once or twice, such as Scottish baronial architecture, Baroque Revival, Queen Anne style architecture and Neoclassical architecture.
As with the architectural styles he used when designing his buildings, the materials and decoration also show the use of diverse materials. Waterhouse is known for the use of terracotta on the exterior of his buildings, most famously at the Natural History Museum. He also used faience, once its mass production was possible, on the interiors of his buildings. But he also used brick, often a combination of different colours, or with other materials such as terracotta and stone. This was especially the case with his buildings for the Prudential Assurance Company, educational, hospital and domestic buildings. In his Manchester Assize Courts, he used different coloured stones externally to decorate it. At Manchester Town Hall and Eaton Hall the exterior walls are almost entirely of a single type of stone. His interiors ranged from the most elaborate at Eaton Hall and Manchester Town Hall, respectively for Britain's richest man and northern England's richest city cottonopolis, to the simplest in buildings like the Royal Liverpool Infirmary, where utility and hygiene dictated the interior design, and the even starker Strangeways Prison.
Early life and education (1830–1854) His father was Alfred Waterhouse Senior (1798–1873), a cotton broker, and his mother was Mary Waterhouse, née Bevan (1805–1880), of Tottenham, both Quakers. Alfred, first of their eight children, was born on 19 July 1830 when the family was living at Stone Hill, Liverpool. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Oakfield, a Tudor-style villa in Aigburth, Liverpool, Lancashire.Cunningham, Colin, & Prudence Waterhouse, Alfred Waterhouse 1830–1905 Biography of a Practice, 1992, Oxford University Press, p. 7. His brothers were accountant Edwin Waterhouse (1841–1917), co-founder of the Price Waterhouse partnership, which now forms part of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and solicitor Theodore Waterhouse (1838–1891), who founded the law firm Waterhouse & Co, now part of Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP in the City of London.
Alfred Waterhouse was educated at the Quaker Grove House School in Tottenham, later to become Leighton Park School.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 8.
He began his architectural studies in 1848 under Richard Lane in Manchester.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 11. He was taught to produce architectural drawings with crisp lines and pale tints, very different from the style he would develop later. He learned theory by copying extracts from books, including Henry William Inwood's Of the Resources of Design in the Architecture of Greece, Egypt, and other Countries, obtained by the Studies of the Architects of those Countries from Nature (1834) and William Chamber's A treatise on civil architecture (1759). He also traced the designs in Frederick Apthorp Paley's Manual of Gothic Mouldings (1845). The scrapbook he used in which he sets out Chambers and Paley's opposing views survives. During this period He is also known to have read John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice (1849) and Augustus Pugin's Contrasts (1836) and The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841). He joined a sketching club, where he met Frederic Shields and Alfred Darbyshire.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 12.
In May 1853 he set out to tour Europe with school friend Thomas Hodgkin who stated that Waterhouse "was entirely under the influence of Ruskin, and communicated his own admiration for Gothic art and a perfect detestation of that beastly Renaissance". The trip lasted nine months. Sailing to Dieppe, passing through Rouen, then Paris, taking a steamer from Dijon down the Saône to Lyon, then on to Nîmes, Arles and Orange. Staying the night at the Grande Chartreuse, passing into Piedmont to Susa and Turin, they walked over the Great St Bernard Pass in a snowstorm into Switzerland. In Basel Waterhouse parted company with Hodgkin and returned to Italy in the company of a Manchester acquaintance George Rooke. Waterhouse's sketchbook from the trip survives and is titled Scraps from France, Switzerland, and Italy. Every notebook sketch is dated and labelled so his itinerary can be followed. In Italy he visited Isola Bella, Certosa di Pavia, Milan, Bergamo, Monza and Venice where he remained for two weeks in August.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 13. Here he sketched the Doge's Palace and St Mark's Basilica. The tour continued in Padua, Vicenza and Verona. By the end of September he arrived in Florence, where he stayed a week, sketching Giotto's Campanile, amongst other buildings. He continued via Siena, Fiesole, Lucca and Pisa to Naples, where he stayed around three weeks and toured surrounding towns. In November he arrived in Rome and stayed into the new year. Returning to northern Italy he revisited several cities before passing through Turin on the way to Basel and Strasbourg.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 14.
Much later in life, Waterhouse in his 1890 presidential address at the RIBA had this to say about sketching by architectural students:
On his return to Britain, Alfred set up in 1854 his own architectural practice based in Cross Street Chambers, Manchester.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 18.
Manchester practice (1854–1865)
Waterhouse continued to practice in Manchester for 11 years, until moving his practice to London in 1865. At this stage of his career most of his commissions were either in the north-west or north-east of England. His earliest commissions were mainly for domestic buildings. Among Waterhouse's first commissions in 1854 were for his family: a set of stables at Sneyd Park, for his father, who had moved to Bristol, and alterations to the home of his uncle Roger Waterhouse at Mossley Bank in Liverpool.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 19 In executing the commission for the cemetery buildings at Warrington Road, Ince in Makerfield (1855–56), he began his move towards designing public buildings in his developing Neo-Gothic style, building a lodge for the registrar, and two chapels, one Church of England in Gothic style, and one for Roman Catholic and Non-conformists in Norman style.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 215 His first commission for a commercial building was for the now demolished Binyon & Fryer warehouse and sugar refinery in Chester Street, Manchester (1855). The building was of two floors made of brick with stone dressings and Italianate in style. The intended upper floors based on the Doge's Palace remained unbuilt.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 208 Also he designed the Droylesden Institute (1858, demolished) in the Manchester suburb of Droylsden. It contained a reading room and other educational facilities and had some Gothic details. A similar building was the Bingley Mechanics' Institute built (1862–65), located in Bingley, with a hall and reading room in a Gothic style.Cunningham & Waterhouse, pp. 211, 217
His first large new country house design was Hinderton Hall (1856–57), Cheshire, for Liverpool merchant Christopher Bushell, built of red sandstone, slate roofs, stables, gardener's cottage and boundary walls. Hinderton, Gothic in style, is very restrained and plain compared with his more mature works. Representative of the several suburban houses of his early career is New Heys (1861–65), Allerton, Liverpool, built for lawyer W.G. Benson at a cost of £6,700 (approx £800,000 in 2019), built of brick with stone dressing, with slate roof, it included stables, conservatory, garden layout and furniture.
In Nantwich, Churchside, Waterhouse designed the former Manchester and Liverpool District Bank (1863–66), built of red brick. It included the manager's house.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 221 Waterhouse's first completely new parish church was the Anglican St John the Divine (1863), Brooklands Road, Sale, Cheshire. It is Gothic, built of Hollington stone, with aisles and transepts, patterned brickwork inside, with external stonework of a single colour. The design of the roof is also restrained compared with Waterhouse's later designs.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 220 Other early chapels included three for the Congregational church, Ancoats (1861–65, demolished), Rusholme (1863, demolished) and the Besses o' th' Barn (1863) now United Reform church, all were Gothic in style.Cunningham & Waterhouse, pp. 216, 221
Waterhouse had connections with wealthy Quaker industrialists through schooling, marriage and religious affiliations, many of whom commissioned him to design and build country houses, especially near Darlington. Several were built for members of the Backhouse family, founders of Backhouse's Bank, a forerunner of Barclays Bank. In Darlington Backhouse's Bank is of 1864-67. For Alfred Backhouse, Waterhouse built Pilmore Hall (1863), now known as Rockliffe Hall, in Hurworth-on-Tees. Waterhouse designed for Joseph Pease Hutton Hall in Yorkshire (1864–71), a large house Gothic of red brick with stone dressings and a slate roof. The commission included the gardens; the billiard room and conservatory were added in (1871–74) and there were further alterations and new stables added in 1875.Cunningham & Waterhouse, p. 222 Hutton Hall also had a feature unique in a Waterhouse house: Victorian Turkish baths.p. 110, Victorian Turkish Baths, Malcolm Shifrin, 2015, Historic England The first of his significant public buildings outside Manchester was Darlington town clock and covered market hall (1861–64) in Gothic style, with the market built from cast iron, divided into five sections. The main building contractor was R. Stapp; chimneypieces were provided by Joseph Bonehill; the iron work was by F.A. Skidmore and J.W. Russell & Son and the clerk of works was S. Harrison. The building cost £9,851, with an extension and repairs (1865–66) costing £2,615. The clock tower was paid for by Joseph Pease.