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Wood, Edgar
(b Middleton, Lancs, 17 May 1860; d Porto Maurizio, Italy, 12 Oct 1935). English architect and draughtsman. He was perhaps the most conspicuously flamboyant among the English architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement. He practised, principally from Manchester, from 1885 to c. 1922 and, in particular, served the textile communities of the Lancashire and Yorkshire border. He was the mainstay of the Northern Art Workers’ Guild (1896–c. 1914), an outstanding architectural draughtsman and a master of the architectural sketch. He exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy, and examples of his work are held at the RIBA Drawings Collection in London and at numerous galleries in the north of England. From the 1880s Wood was attracted by avant-garde ideas, then represented by Aestheticism and the emerging Arts and Crafts Movement. He developed a vocabulary from vernacular styles developed in the Pennine Hills region and gradually adapted these in an extraordinary way to produce a form of proto-Expressionism. Sensitive interpretations of appropriate vernacular character are seen at Banney Royd (c. 1900–01), Edgerton, Huddersfield, and Holly Cottage (1904), Holly Road, Bramhall, while the most extreme examples of his expressionistic works are Lindley Clock Tower (1899–1902), Huddersfield, and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, (1903–8; now the Edgar Wood Centre), Victoria Park, Manchester. From 1904 he worked in association with J. Henry Sellers (1861–1954), who shared similar aspirations, but each practised independently. Partly through Sellers’s example, Wood’s work began to show more classical influences. He also adopted concrete flat-roof construction and, from 1908, Arabic decorative motifs. Upmeads (1908), a house at Stafford, boldly demonstrates the former tendencies, and to these Wood’s own house (1914–16) at 224 Hale Road, Hale, Cheshire, adds the latter’s exotic richness.
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