(b Cobham, Kent, 9 June 1862; d Cobham, 4 Feb 1946). English architect and writer, also active in South Africa and India. He was articled to a cousin, Arthur Baker, a former assistant of George Gilbert Scott I, in 1879 and attended classes at the Architectural Association and Royal Academy Schools before joining the office of George & Peto in London (1882), where he first met and befriended Edwin Lutyens. Baker set up in independent practice in 1890 but moved to South Africa in 1892 to join his brother Lionel Baker. In Cape Town he met Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, who directed his attention to the traditional European Cape Dutch architecture of the province and asked him to rebuild his house Groote Schuur (1893, 1897), now the official residence of South Africa’s prime ministers. Applying the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement to local conditions, Baker produced a series of houses, both in the Cape Province and the Transvaal, which were instrumental in the revival of Cape Dutch architecture. In 1899 he entered into partnership in Cape Town with FRANCIS MASEY, who was involved with most of his buildings in the Cape. Rhodes then sent Baker on a Mediterranean tour (1899–1900) to study the monuments of Greek and Roman antiquity as the basis for creating an imperial British architecture. This bore fruit in Baker’s Kimberley Siege Memorial (1904) and Rhodes Memorial (1905–8), Cape Town, a Hellenistic Doric stoa, on the slopes of Table Mountain, as well as several neo-classical commercial buildings in Cape Town. In 1902 he moved to Johannesburg, establishing partnerships first with Ernest Willmott Sloper (1871–1916) and then with Francis Fleming (1875–1950); a third office in Bloemfontein was run by F. K. KENDALL, who took over the Cape Town practice as Baker’s partner (1910–18) after Masey’s departure.

• Baker, Herbert
  • Indian subcontinent, §IV, 3: Urban planning, c AD 600–1947
  • Masey, Francis
  • South Africa, §X, 1(ii): Metalwork, 1795 and after
  • Walcot, William
  • architecture
    • banks
      • Bank, §2(i): Architecture and decoration, before c 1850
      • Taylor, Robert
      • Troup, F. W.
    • cemeteries
      • Cemetery, §3: 20th century
    • government buildings
      • Bloemfontein
      • Delhi, §I, 8: British period
      • Indian subcontinent, §III, 8(i): 19th century–1947: Late colonial architecture
      • Kenya, §2: Architecture
      • Pretoria
      • South Africa, §III, 3: Architecture, c 1902–45
    • houses
      • Cape Town
      • Johannesburg
      • Vernacular architecture, §II, 8: Indian subcontinent
  • assistants
    • Leith, Gordon
    • Walgate, C. P.
  • collaboration
    • Lutyens, Edwin, §1(iii): Edwardian Baroque and New Delhi, c 1910–18
  • furniture
    • South Africa, §VII, 4: Furniture, after c 1900
  • groups and movements
    • Baroque Revival
    • Colonial Revival
  • staff
    • Kendall, F. K.
  • teachers
    • George & Peto