Queen Anne Style Architecture - British 19th-century Queen Anne Style

British 19th-century Queen Anne Style

George Devey (1820–1886) and the better-known Norman Shaw (1831–1912) popularized the Queen Anne style of British architecture of the industrial age in the 1870s. Norman Shaw published a book of architectural sketches as early as 1858, and his evocative pen-and-ink drawings began to appear in trade journals and artistic magazines in the 1870s. (American commercial builders quickly adopted the style.)

Shaw's eclectic designs often included Tudor elements, and this "Old English" style also became popular in the United States, where it became known (inaccurately) as the Queen Anne style. Confusion between buildings constructed during the reign of Queen Anne and the "Queen Anne" Style still persists, especially in England. The well-known architectural commentator and author Marcus Binney, writing in the London Times in 2006, describes "Poulton House" built in 1706, during the reign of Queen Anne, as "...Queen Anne at its most delightful". Binney lists what he describes as the typical features of the style:

• a sweep of steps leading to a carved stone door-case
• rows of painted sash windows in boxes set flush with the brickwork
• stone quoins emphasizing corners
• a central triangular pediment set against a hipped roof with dormers
• typically box-like "double pile" plans, two rooms deep

In the late 1850s the name "Queen Anne" was in the air, following publication in 1852 of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., A Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne.

One minor side-effect of Thackeray's novel and of Norman Shaw's freehand picturesque vernacular Renaissance survives to this day. When, in the early 1870s, Chinese-inspired Early Georgian furniture on cabriole legs, featuring smooth expanses of walnut, and chairs with flowing lines and slat backs began to be looked for in out-of-the-way curio shops (Macquoid 1904), the style was mis-attributed to the reign of Queen Anne, and the "Queen Anne" misnomer has stuck to this day, in American as well as English furniture-style designations. (Even the most stylish and up-to-date furnishings of the historical reign of Queen Anne, as inventories reveal, used a style that 21st-century connoisseurs would immediately identify as "William and Mary".)

The British Victorian version of the style empathises more closely with the Arts and Crafts movement than does its American counterpart. A good example is Severalls Hospital in Colchester, Essex (1913–1997), now defunct. The historic precedents of the Queen Anne style were broad:

• fine brickwork, often in a warmer, softer finish than the Victorians characteristically used, varied with terracotta panels, or tile-hung upper stories, with crisply-painted white woodwork, or blond limestone detailing
• oriel windows, often stacked one above another
• corner towers
• asymmetrical fronts and picturesque massing
• Flemish mannerist sunken panels of strapwork
• deeply shadowed entrances
• broad porches

- a domesticated free Renaissance style.

When an open architectural competition took place in 1892 for a County Hall (see photo, right) to be built in Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the instructions to competitors noted that "the style of architecture will be left to the competitors but the Queen Anne or Renaissance School of Architecture appears suited to an old town like Wakefield" (ref. Wakefield). The executed design, by architects James Gibson and Samuel Russell of London, combines a corner turret, grandly domed and with gargoyles at the angles, freely combined with Flemish Renaissance stepped gables.

In the 20th century Edwin Lutyens and others used an elegant version of the style, usually with red-brick walls contrasting with pale stone details.