Edmund Aikin

Edmund Aikin (2 October 1780 – 11 March 1820) was an English architect and writer on architecture. He spent the last years of his life in Liverpool, where he designed the Wellington Rooms.

Life Aikin came from a Unitarian background. He was the youngest son of Dr. John Aikin, M.D., and was born on 2 October 1780 at Warrington. Aikin suffered from a speech impediment and was educated almost entirely at home by his parents. he became a founder-member of the London Architectural Society. The next year he designed the New Gravel Pit Chapel in Hackney, for the Rev. Robert Aspland, producing plans for a rectangular building with an octagonal roof and seating plan. The foundation stone was laid on 16 October 1809, and it opened on 4 November 1810. Aikin took no fee for the work.

In 1810 he published a set of designs for villas, preceded by a long introduction in which he criticised the use of the Gothic style in domestic architecture, proposing instead the use of a kind of eastern, or Islamic style, inspired by the buildings shown in Thomas Daniell's Views in India.

He worked as an assistant to Sir Samuel Bentham, the architect of the Millbank Penitentiary,

In around 1814, designs for the Wellington Assembly Rooms in Liverpool having been accepted by the committee in charge of the project, he moved to the city to supervise their construction. He was based there for the rest of his life. – and built a number of villas in the area, some, against his natural inclinations, in the fashionable Gothic style.

Aikin died at his father's house at Stoke Newington on 11 March 1820. Designs for villas and other rural buildings, Engraved on thirty-one plates, with plans and explanations; together with an introductory essay, containing remarks on the prevailing defects of modern architecture and on investigation of the style best adapted for the dwellings of the present times. (London, 1808) An essay on the Doric order of architecture : containing a historical view of its rise and progress among the ancients, with a critical investigation of its principles of composition and adaptation to modern use; illustrated by figures of the principal antique examples, drawn to one scale, from the best authorities (London, 1810) An essay towards a history and description of the cathedral church of St. Paul, London, with a concise account of the edifices which have previously occupied the same site (London, 1812). With illustrations by James Elmes.