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Richard Barry Parker (18 November 1867 – 21 February 1947) was an English architect and urban planner associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. He was primarily known for his architectural partnership with Raymond Unwin.
Parker was born in Chesterfield in 1867, the son of bank manager Robert Parker. He trained at T.C. Simmonds Atelier of Art in Derby and the studio of George Faulkner Armitage in Altrincham. In 1891 he joined his father in Buxton and designed three large houses for him there.
In 1896 Parker went into partnership with Raymond Unwin, who was Parker's half cousin as well as his brother-in-law, having married his sister Ethel in 1893.
One of their earliest commissions was to design and build a large family home on farming land in Clayton Staffordshire, for a local manufacturer of pottery, Charles Frederick Goodfellow. Finished in 1899 the house gave them the opportunity to incorporate many internal and external features including an open, galleried courtyard, and custom furniture and fittings in Arts and Crafts style in many rooms.
Originally, as was the custom, named the Goodfellow House, when it was bought in 1926 by another Potteries manufacturer, Colley Shorter (Arthur Colley Austin Shorter, 1882 to 1963) he renamed it Chetwynd House, and that name remains with it to today. Shorter's second wife was the British ceramic designer Clarice Cliff, and it is with her that the house is now most closely identified, as she worked extensively on the large gardens with Shorter for many of her retirement years, and after his death. [1]
They collaborated on architectural writing including The Art of Building a Home (1901), applying the Arts and Crafts Movement to working-class housing.
In 1902 they were asked to design a model village at New Earswick near York for Joseph and Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, and the following year they were given the opportunity to take part in the creation of Letchworth, when the First Garden City Company asked them to submit a plan. Two other pairs of architects (W. R. Lethaby & Halsey Ricardo and Geoffry Lucas & Sidney Cranfield) also submitted plans.
In 1903 they were involved with the "Cottages Near a Town Exhibit" for the Northern Art Workers Guild of Manchester. In 1904 after their plan for Letchworth was adopted they opened a second office at Baldock moving to a purpose-built office in Letchworth in 1907. In 1905 they were invited by Henrietta Barnett to design the new Hampstead Garden Suburb, working in association with Edwin Lutyens. Unwin left Letchworth for Hampstead in 1906 leaving Parker to continue the work in Letchworth where, in addition to having a supervision role, the design of some 275 dwellings and a number of public buildings is credited to the Parker & Unwin partnership.
In May 1914 the partnership of Parker & Unwin was dissolved, as Unwin became increasingly involved with public sector work. Parker continued his town planning practice, advising on Porto, Portugal in 1915 and São Paulo, Brazil in 1917–1919. From 1927 he advised the Manchester City Council on the development of Wythenshawe, where he had a continuing role until 1941. He died at Letchworth in 1947 at the age of 79. Parker became a Quaker toward the end of his life. [2]
Parker was an admirer of the American parkways, notably those in Westchester County, hence the prominence given to Princess Parkway in the Wythenshawe plan. His Presidential Address to the Town Planning Institute in 1929 shows his desire to create parkways in Britain, partly as an answer to the problem of ribbon development on newly built main roads.
The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.
Sir Ebenezer Howard was an English urban planner and founder of the garden city movement, known for his publication To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), the description of a utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature. The publication resulted in the founding of the garden city movement, and the building of the first garden city, Letchworth Garden City, commenced in 1903.
Clarice Cliff was an English ceramic artist and designer. Active from 1922 to 1963, Cliff became the head of the factory creative department.
The year 1903 in architecture involved some significant architectural events and new buildings.
Hampstead Garden Suburb is an elevated suburb of London, north of Hampstead, west of Highgate and east of Golders Green. It is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations. It is an example of early twentieth-century domestic architecture and town planning in the London Borough of Barnet, northwest London.
Charles Paget Wade was an English architect, artist-craftsman and poet of Afro-Caribbean descent; today he is perhaps best remembered for the eclectic collection he amassed during his life, a collection which can be seen at Snowshill Manor, his former home in the village of Snowshill, Gloucestershire, which he gave to the National Trust in 1951.
Sir Raymond Unwin was a prominent and influential English engineer, architect and town planner, with an emphasis on improvements in working class housing.
The garden city movement was a 20th century urban planning movement promoting satellite communities surrounding the central city and separated with greenbelts. These Garden Cities would contain proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. Ebenezer Howard first posited the idea in 1898 as a way to capture the primary benefits of the countryside and the city while avoiding the disadvantages presented by both. In the early 20th century, Letchworth, Brentham Garden Suburb and Welwyn Garden City were built in or near London according to Howard's concept and many other garden cities inspired by his model have since been built all over the world.
Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo was a progressive English architect and designer, who influenced the Arts and Crafts Movement, notably through the Century Guild of Artists, which he set up in partnership with Herbert Horne in 1882. He was the pioneer of the Modern Style and in turn global Art Nouveau movement.
Sunnyside Gardens is a community within Sunnyside, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. The area was the first development in the United States patterned after the ideas of the garden city movement initiated in England in the first decades of the twentieth century by Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin, specifically Hampstead Garden Suburb and Letchworth Garden City.
The A5103 is a major road in England. It runs from Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester city centre to junction 3 of the M56 motorway and is one of Manchester's principal radial routes.
William Harrison Cowlishaw (1869–1957) was a British architect of the European Arts and Crafts school and a follower of William Morris.
Charles Holloway James,, (1893–1953), architect, specialised in designs for homes and housing projects, but also completed large public works, particularly in collaboration with Stephen Rowland Pierce.
Thomas Geoffry Lucas, generally known as Geoffry Lucas, but often found incorrectly spelt as Geoffrey Lucas, was a 20th-century English architect. He is perhaps best known for his work in connection with the garden city movement, but was also active in other areas, including the design of churches and church fittings.
George Lister Sutcliffe was an English Arts and Crafts architect and author of a number of technical and architectural publications.
Romford Garden Suburb, is a late-Edwardian housing development in Gidea Park, in the London Borough of Havering. The object of the new suburb, which was built on land belonging to Gidea Hall, then occupied by the Liberal politician Herbert Raphael, was, according to his parliamentary colleague John Burns, to "provide families with a well-built, modern home regardless of class or status" and "to bring the towns into the country and the country into the towns".
Philip Clissett was a Victorian country chairmaker who influenced and inspired the English Arts and Crafts Movement through various architects and designers. His chance meeting with James MacLaren has been described as "undoubtedly a seminal point in the subsequent development of the Arts and Crafts Movement", and led to the furnishing of the meeting room of the Art Workers Guild with a large number of his chairs which can still be seen today. These chairs have been "highly influential", having been "seen by almost everyone involved in art and design from the late 1880s". They particularly influenced Ernest Gimson who, in 1890, spent six weeks with Clissett learning to make ladderback chairs. Clissett's chairs were popular with the Arts and Crafts cognoscenti, and were used by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in early commissions, and by the architectural team of Richard Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. They were also used as part of the original furnishing of the Passmore Edwards Settlement at Mary Ward House, 5 Tavistock Place, London by the architects A. Dunbar Smith and C. Cecil Brewer.
Thomas Alwyn Lloyd, known as T. Alwyn Lloyd, was a leading Welsh architect and town planner. He was one of the founders of the Town Planning Institute in 1914 and its President in 1933. He was also a founding member of the Council for the Protection of Rural Wales in 1928 and served as its chairman from 1947 to 1959. Meic Stephens described Lloyd's work as follows:
Lloyd's small-scale buildings reflected his deep feeling for place, in both historical and environmental terms, as in the Garden Villages for which he was responsible in various parts of Wales.
Howgills in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, England, is a Grade II listed building on the Register of Historic England in use as a Meeting House for the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Howard Park and Gardens is a public recreation ground in Letchworth, in Hertfordshire, England, laid out when the garden city of Letchworth was created. It is listed Grade II in Historic England's Register of Parks and Gardens.
Richard Barry Parker in libraries ( WorldCat catalog)
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