A design for life: Eleanor Nesbitt on architect Thomas Rickman

‘Thomas and Lucy could not be married in a Meeting house.’

As a Coventry Quaker I’m excited by the reopening of Drapers’ Hall. It was built by Quaker architect Thomas Rickman and his partner Henry Hutchinson. It opened in 1832. The repurposing of the hall is one of seven projects celebrating Charles Windsor’s seventieth birthday.

Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) was a major figure in Britain’s Gothic Revival, along with Augustus Pugin and Gilbert Scott. Like Pugin (who designed St Chad’s Cathedral), Thomas designed churches in Birmingham. But his only completely surviving building there is the former Midland Bank. The most famous building designed by Rickman and Huchinson is the Court of St John’s College, Cambridge and its ‘Bridge of Sighs’. Other works include Gwrych Castle (the setting for TV’s I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of Here) which was, reputedly, Europe’s largest building when it opened in 1822.

Thomas Rickman was born into a large Quaker family in Maidenhead, Berkshire. His father, a grocer and druggist, had wanted him to train as a doctor but Thomas went into business instead. Like two of his uncles, he also defied his elders’ counsel by marrying his first cousin. Anglicans were allowed to do this, but it was forbidden for Quakers. Thomas and Lucy could not be married in a Meeting house.

Sadly, Lucy died a few years later. Then in 1806 Thomas’s business venture failed. His bankruptcy was another cause of estrangement from Quakers as he was only allowed to participate fully when he had repaid his debts. In his distress he took to long country walks, which aroused his passion for church architecture. In just one year, 1811, he is said to have studied 3,000 ecclesiastical buildings. He would return from his walks with sketches and scale drawings – unlike his contemporaries, Thomas was almost entirely self-taught.

In 1807 he shifted to Liverpool. By 1817 he was well enough known as an architect to open his own practice.  He teamed up with a Chester iron founder, Thomas Harrison, and many of their churches incorporated cast iron. Chester cathedral played its part in sparking Rickman’s interest in medieval architecture. 

Rickman’s classification of English architecture (An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation, 1817) became a nineteenth-century bestseller. It has been suggested that, as an outsider to the established church, he was more objective in his appraisal of churches.

Despite earning Friends’ disapproval in his early years, Rickman did carry on attending Meetings for Worship. In his final years, however, he became a member of the Irvingian Church. Perhaps its emphasis on miracles and spiritual gifts caught Thomas’s imagination, although – in contrast – Pugin’s enforced attendance as a child at meetings addressed by the church’s founder, Edward Irving, had driven him into Catholicism…

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