Edgar Wood

Early years Edgar Wood was born in 1860, the sixth of eight children born to Thomas Broadbent Wood and Mary Sykes. Only three of the children lived to adulthood. The family lived in Middleton and Wood's father was a mill owner, a Unitarian, a Liberal, and had a reputation as a strict disciplinarian. Edgar Wood was educated at the local Queen Elizabeth Grammar School.

The direction of Edgar Wood's life after school was a controversial subject in the Wood household. It had been assumed by his father that Edgar would enter the family cotton business but he had different ideas. Edgar's ambition was to be an artist. The difference in opinion was finally resolved in a compromise which saw Edgar agreeing to train as an architect.

Career

Wood was articled to Mills and Murgatroyd, a Manchester architectural firm responsible for a number of prominent buildings in the Manchester area. Perhaps the best way to judge how Wood felt about his years as a pupil can be gleaned from his own comments in a lecture he delivered in 1900 in Birmingham, "My earliest architectural years were passed in an atmosphere where beautiful creative powers as applied to building, and life in design generally, were drowned in the solemnity of commerce, tracing paper and the checking of quantities."

Wood passed the RIBA qualifying examinations and became an Associate in 1885. He set up his own office in Middleton and his first commission seems to have been for a shelter and drinking fountain (below) paid for by his stepmother and placed in the Middleton market square to commemorate Queen Victoria's Jubilee.

By 1892 it appears that his practice was flourishing and he moved into new premises at 78 Cross Street in the heart of Manchester. Ever the artist he would arrive at work wearing a large black cloak, lined with red silk, a flat, broad-brimmed hat, and brandishing a silver-handled cane. He said, "If an architect is not allowed to advertise his name he must advertise his personality."

John H. G. Archer says of Wood that, "Architecturally, Wood's sympathy lay with the progressive movement of the day, represented first by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement". Wood was a founder member of the Northern Art Worker's Guild and became its Master in 1897. Wood practised in various crafts and he designed furniture, jewellery, and metalwork. Archer adds, "In Wood's architecture the influences of both the Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau are clearly apparent, the former by his revival of the vernacular traditions of Lancashire and West Riding buildings, and the latter by his use of elongated forms and interwoven motifs."

Wood was instrumental in saving the colonnade of Manchester's first town hall, designed by Francis Goodwin, which stood in King Street and was demolished 1911. Wood raised a public appeal and prepared a scheme for the re-erection of the colonnade in Platt Fields park, and when this was rejected he drew up another for a site in Heaton Park where the colonnade now stands.

Wood devised numerous masterplans for the Manchester Corporation. The city was burgeoning by the Edwardian era and needed houses to clear slums. One of his masterplans which was submitted in 1909 included an unorthodox radial suburban plan for Withington which centred on a small village. Wood's masterplan was rejected, but influenced future designs. Numerous housing estates in south Manchester in areas such as Withington and Burnage have houses centred on a radial plan as opposed to straight streets of terraced houses.

Works