12 Facts About Reginald Blomfield

Sir Reginald Theodore Blomfield was a prolific British architect, garden designer and author of the Victorian and Edwardian period.

Reginald Blomfield's mother, Isabella, was a first cousin of his father and the second daughter of the Rt.

Reginald Blomfield was brought up in Kent, where his father became rector of Dartford in 1857 and then of Aldington in 1868.

Reginald Blomfield enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools, where Richard Phene Spiers was Master of the Architectural School.

Reginald Blomfield found the atmosphere in his uncle's office uncongenial and the practice's traditional Gothic Revival output hard and soulless, although he gained valuable mechanical skills at draughtsmanship and site experience.

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Reginald Blomfield prospered more at the Academy Schools, taking the junior prize in 1882 and the senior prize the following year, with a design for a town house in the fashionable Queen Anne Revival style, of which he was later ashamed.

In 1886 Reginald Blomfield married the daughter of Henry Burra of Rye, Sussex, a town where he had designed several houses, including his own, the very informal Point Hill.

Reginald Blomfield played a major part in the completion of the Quadrant on Regent Street, London when Richard Norman Shaw withdrew from the project.

Reginald Blomfield was sixty-five in 1921, but continued working at a gradually decreasing pace into his late 70s, producing a large number of war memorials in the 1920s, including the Menin Gate at Ypres.

Reginald Blomfield's views invoked the criticism of the gardener William Robinson, who pursued a lengthy dispute with those architects who dared to interest themselves in gardening, especially Blomfield and John Dando Sedding.

Reginald Blomfield's other published works include Studies in Architecture ; The Mistress Art, Architectural Drawing and Draughtsmen ; The Touchstone of Architecture ; Six Architects ; Memoirs of an Architect ; the controversial anti-Modernist polemic, Modernismus and the sketchy Richard Norman Shaw .

Reginald Blomfield died aged 86 on 27 December 1942 and is buried in family plot in the churchyard of St James, Playden, East Sussex, half a mile north of his country home Point Hill, Rye.