Ernest Newton

Ernest Newton
Born (1856-09-12)12 September 1856
London
Died 25 January 1922(1922-01-25) (aged 65)
London
Nationality British
Occupation Architect

Ernest Newton ARA FRIBA (12 September 1856 – 25 January 1922) was an English architect and President of Royal Institute of British Architects.

Life

Newton was the son of an estate manager of Bickley, Kent. He was educated at Uppingham School. He married, in 1881, Antoinette Johanna Hoyack, of Rotterdam, and had three sons. He was resident again at Bickley in 1883 and built his own house at Bird in Hand Lane, Bickley in 1884. In the next 20 years he built many houses in the Bickley and Chislehurst area – no two being identical.

Career

Flint House, Goring-on-Thames designed by Newton

He served his apprenticeship in the office of Richard Norman Shaw from 1873 to 1876, remaining for a further three years as an assistant before commencing private practice on his own account in London in February 1880. He was briefly in partnership with William West Neve around 1882. A founder member of the Art Workers Guild in the 1880s. He developed a career designing one-off houses largely in Bromley and Bickley and later moving into 'high profile' country home commissions across England.

“He is one of the busiest architects in England and therefore represents the good principles of current thinking about the house in perhaps its most accessible form..." Hermann Muthesius The English House 1904.

“His eminence as an architect of unexcelled skill in a class of work that constitutes England's chief or sole claim to supremacy – the capture and apt embodiment of the very spirit of the home..." Obituary, Architect's Journal; 1 February 1922, p187.

In the 1890s he acted as consulting architect to William Willett. Newton was President of RIBA 1914–1917. In 1918 he received the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. In 1919, he was elected a Royal Academician, and was awarded the CBE in 1920. His last piece of work was a war memorial at his former school at Uppingham.

Writing

He published Sketches for Country Residences (1882), A Book of Houses (1890 ), and A Book of Country Houses (1903).

“..a small house is in many ways more difficult to design than a large one, for while every part must be minutely schemed, nothing should be cramped or mean looking, the whole house should be conceived broadly and simply, and with an air of repose, the stamp of home." A Book of Houses

His son, William Godfrey Newton, (1885–1949), published The Work of Ernest Newton R.A. (1925).

Works in Kent

References

Wikisource has the text of a 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica article about Ernest Newton.
  1. ↑ The Builder, 1 December 1900
  2. ↑ The Builder, 11 November 1905
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