The Architects: Edward W Godwin

Sandra Grant looks at the career of the estate's first architect.
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Architect, theatrical designer, antiquary, writer, designer of furniture, textiles, ceramics and wallpaper – Edward Godwin was a man of many talents. By the time Jonathan Carr, Bedford Park's founder, saw his designs for houses in Nottinghamshire he was already established.

Mr Carr was looking for homes that would be cheap to build and could be varied to fit different plots. The first Godwin designs, published in Building News in 1876, were roundly criticised for their steep stairs, small rooms and passageways and having a lavatory in the bathroom.

ln the event only a few – somewhat modified detached and semi-detached houses – were built and Jonathan Carr found other architects for his new suburb.

You can see Godwin designs at numbers 1 and 2 The Avenue (original working drawing below); adaptations by the estate surveyor, William Wilson, include houses in Queen Anne's Grove, and Woodstock Road. While incorporating the gables and hanging tiles which became a Bedford Park signature, the Godwin houses are noticeably taller and thinner than their successors.

It is unlikely that the architect was particularly upset by his critics. While his talents were undeniable, his private life, bohemian tastes and friendships, made him anathema to the more straitlaced sections of Victorian society, and he seems in any case to have been an outspoken, individual who preferred being an outsider.

Born in Bristol in 1833, the youngest of five children of a leather merchant, Edward Godwin was apprenticed to Iocal architect William Armstrong. Perhaps because of the poor training he himself received, he was always interested in teaching architectural students.

He set up practice in Ireland, returning to England in 1859 when he married Sarah Yonge. Their home in Bristol was decorated with Persian rugs on bare boards, plain coloured walls and Japanese prints, which he considered healthier than the cluttered carpeted look then in vogue. By now he had became friends with painter James McNeill Whistler and William Burges.

His first major success was winning the competition for designing the Italian Gothic Northampton Town Hall in 1861. He went on to design castles in Ireland and various buildings for the English aristocracy, including a Kensington studio for Princess Louise, Queen Victoria's daughter.

After Sarah died in 1865 he moved to London, where he became as well known for his furniture as his architecture. Driven, like many of his contemporaries, by a failure to find furnishings to complement his interiors, over the next 25 years he designed around 400 pieces in styles running from mediaeval, Gothic, Georgian and Queen Anne to Egyptian, Japanese and Jacobean.

Like his interest in architecture, his fascination with theatre began when he was a small boy. While in Bristol he contributed a series of theatrical and opera "jottings" in which he formulated his belief that costumes and scenery should reflect the time in which the play was set. He wrote further reviews in London during the 1880s when he moved from theory to practice, using his antiquarian knowledge to research period detail, eventually becoming a designer/manager, working with the great actors of his day.

In Bristol he had met a 15 year old actress called Ellen Terry, for whom he designed a costume. When they met again in London she was married to the artist George Frederic Watts. Although they never married (G F Watts refused to divorce her), Edward and Ellen lived together for six years, producing a daughter, Edith Craig, and a son, Edward Gordon Craig. The latter became an avant-garde director in his own right, and lover of dancer Isadora Duncan.

There has never been any explanation as to why Edward Godwin separated from Ellen Terry in 1875. He later married a young student, Beatrice Philip, by whom he had a son, also named Edward. After her husband's death Beatrice married James Whistler.

Edward Godwin's most high profile architectural commissions came in the late 1870s when he designed a series of artists' houses in Chelsea. These, too, had their critics and during the last years of his life the architect found himself drawing up projects for houses and theatres that were never built. His premature death in 1886 led his friends to feel he had never fulfilled his potential. After Ellen Terry died, among her papers was found a sonnet written in his memory by his friend Dr John Todhunter, a poet and playwright who lived in Bedford Park.

They tell me he had faults – I know of one
Dying too soon, he left his best undone