The Making of an Architect

It was not much fun growing up in Gawcott in the early nineteenth century. The land in North Buckinghamshire was poor, and despite the extra money provided by lacemaking, poverty was rife. The family, which supplemented its own income by taking in young trainee priests, held stern evangelical views, which meant that it was shunned by the local gentry and clergy, who subscribed to Higher Church opinions.

Portrait of George Gilbert Scott

A pointer to GGS’s future profession can be found when, following an exceptionally dry summer, the village chapel cracked in half and had to be demolished. Its replacement and a new vicarage were both financed by the village lace dealer, who while the richest man in the village still lived and ate in a single room with all his servants. They were designed, more than competently, by GGS’s father, Thomas, who saw no need to waste valuable money on employing an architect.

Aged 15, he was sent to stay at Latimer with his aunt Elisabeth and her husband Rev. Samuel King, a broadminded man of wide interests – astronomer, wood turner, glass painter, brass founder and devotee of natural sciences. This intelligent, likeable but childless couple, living in a fine eighteenth-century rectory in the attractive surroundings of the Chilterns, in marked contrast to the gloom of Gawcott, introduced GGS to the major books on architecture and set him on the road to his future profession.

Gilbert Scott in the Office

On the advice of a travelling Bible salesman, he was apprenticed for four years to a North London architect, Jack Edmeston, a dissenter of safe Low Church views who wrote hymns, proved a cultured companion, and possessed a fine library but failed to design any building of merit.

Continue Reading Part 2

Just as self-taught architects once reshaped skylines, today’s tech disruptors, coders, and designers are redefining the digital and built world—proving that innovation often starts in the most unlikely of places.