Sir Aston Webb
b. London, 1849;
d. London, 1930.

Sir Aston Webb was a capable and prolific British designer of public buildings and institutions. Unrelated to Philip Webb and in many respects his professional opposite, he was articled to R. R. Banks and Charles Barry (Jr.), set up in practice in 1873 and from 1882 was in partnership with Edward Ingress Bell (1837-1914). His reputation was founded on a flair for effective large- scale design and on a confident stylistic versatility which was given full scope in an epoch of institutional expansion. The first of many competition successes was his design for the Birmingham Law Courts in an early French Neo-Renaissance manner. Subsequent work ranged from Italian/Byzantine at Birmingham University to Elizabethan at Christ’s Hospital; from the unambiguous imperialism of Admiralty Arch (reflecting the almost universal official preference for eclectic Neo-Baroque during the Edwardian period) to the variegated motifs of the Victoria and Albert Museum fa?ade. Regarded as the leading and famous architect of his generation, he was knighted in 1904 and received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (1905) and the American Gold Medal (1907).

Major buildings / works:
Law Courts, Birmingham, 1886-91.
Royal Services Institute, Whitehall, London, 1893-5.
Christ’s Hospital School, Horsham, Sussex, 1893?1902.
Britannia Naval College, Dartmouth, Devon, 1899-1905.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (fa?ade), 1899-1909.
Admiralty Arch, London 1901?11.
Birmingham University, 1906-9.
Royal School of Mines, London, 1909.
Buckingham Palace, London (fa?ade), 1913.

Bibliography:
Alastair Service (ed.) Edwardian Architecture and its Origins, London, 1975.
Alastair Service, The Architects of London, London, 1979.