Batty Langley

Batty Langley (baptised 14 September 1696 – 3 March 1751) was an English garden designer, architect, and prolific writer who produced a number of engraved designs for "Gothick" structures, summerhouses and garden seats in the years before the mid-18th century.

An eccentric landscape designer, he gave four of his sons the names Hiram, Euclid, Vitruvius and Archimedes. He published extensively, and attempted to "improve" Gothic forms by giving them classical proportions.

A garden plan by Langley for Orleans House in Twickenham, west London, mostly demolished in 1926.

Early life Langley was baptised in Twickenham, Middlesex, the son of a jobbing gardener Daniel Langley and his wife Elizabeth. He started worked as a gardener, inheriting some of his father's clients in Twickenham, then a village of suburban villas within easy reach of London by a pleasant water journey on the Thames. An early client was Thomas Vernon of Twickenham Park.

He married Anne Smith in February 1719. They had four children, but she died in June 1726. He had ten further children with his second wife, Catherine. Langley moved from Twickenham to London in 1729, and shifted again from landscape gardening to architecture. Working near Exeter Change in the Strand, he published A Sure Guide to Builders in 1729. He moved to Westminster in the 1730s, where he started to teach drawing, geometry, architecture, and garden design, and continued to teach when he moved to Soho in 1738. He also made and sold stone garden ornaments. He published a wide range of architectural books, from a huge folio on Ancient Masonry in parts from 1733 to 1736 with over 450 plates, through The Builder's Complete Assistant of 1738 (also known as The Builder's Complete Chest-Book) and The Builder's Jewel of 1741, to the tiny The Workman's Golden Rule in 1750, in vicesimo-quarto.

He is best known for one of his confident self-promotions, Ancient Architecture, Restored, and Improved published in 1742 and reissued in 1747 as Gothic Architecture, improved by Rules and Proportions,

Batty Langley was also thought to be an important Freemason; his naming of his son Hiram was a reference to the architect, prominent in Masonic tradition and symbolism, of Solomon's Temple, and many of his books were dedicated to his Masonic brethren. The frontispiece to The Builder's Jewel (1741), for example, contains many examples of Masonic symbolism found in the first three degrees of Freemasonry.

He was imprisoned for debt in Newgate Prison and wrote an account of that institution, An Accurate Description of Newgate. He died at home in Soho in 1751.