12 Facts About William Butterfield

William Butterfield was a British Gothic Revival architect and associated with the Oxford Movement.

William Butterfield's parents were strict non-conformists who ran a chemist's shop in the Strand.

William Butterfield was one of nine children and was educated at a local school.

William Butterfield established his own architectural practice at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1840.

From 1842 Butterfield was involved with the Cambridge Camden Society, later The Ecclesiological Society.

William Butterfield contributed designs to the Society's journal, The Ecclesiologist.

William Butterfield drew religious inspiration from the Oxford Movement and as such, he was very high church despite his non-conformist upbringing.

William Butterfield was a Gothic revival architect, and as such he reinterpreted the original Gothic style in Victorian terms.

In 1849, just before William Butterfield designed the church, John Ruskin had published his Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which he had urged the study of Italian Gothic and the use of polychromy.

At St Bartholomew's, Yealmpton in the same year, William Butterfield used a considerable amount of marquetry work for the interior, and built striped piers, using two colours of marble.

At Oxford, William Butterfield designed Keble College, in a style radically divergent from the university's existing traditions of Gothic architecture, its walls boldly striped with various colours of brick.

William Butterfield died in London in 1900, and was buried in a simple Gothic tomb in Tottenham Cemetery, Haringey, North London.