Barry Parker (Architect)

Richard Barry Parker (18 November 1867 – 21 February 1947) was an English architect and urban planner associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. He was primarily known for his architectural partnership with Raymond Unwin.

Parker was born in Chesterfield in 1867, the son of bank manager Robert Parker. He trained at T.C. Simmonds Atelier of Art in Derby and the studio of George Faulkner Armitage in Altrincham. In 1891 he joined his father in Buxton and designed three large houses for him there.

In 1896 Parker went into partnership with Raymond Unwin, who was Parker's half cousin as well as his brother-in-law, having married his sister Ethel in 1893.

One of their earliest commissions was to design and build a large family home on farming land in Clayton Staffordshire, for a local manufacturer of pottery, Charles Frederick Goodfellow. Finished in 1899 the house gave them the opportunity to incorporate many internal and external features including an open, galleried courtyard, and custom furniture and fittings in Arts and Crafts style in many rooms.

Originally, as was the custom, named the Goodfellow House, when it was bought in 1926 by another Potteries manufacturer, Colley Shorter (Arthur Colley Austin Shorter, 1882 to 1963) he renamed it Chetwynd House, and that name remains with it to today. Shorter's second wife was the British ceramic designer Clarice Cliff, and it is with her that the house is now most closely identified, as she worked extensively on the large gardens with Shorter for many of her retirement years, and after his death.

They collaborated on architectural writing including The Art of Building a Home (1901), applying the Arts and Crafts Movement to working-class housing.

In 1902 they were asked to design a model village at New Earswick near York for Joseph and Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, and the following year they were given the opportunity to take part in the creation of Letchworth, when the First Garden City Company asked them to submit a plan. Two other pairs of architects (W. R. Lethaby & Halsey Ricardo and Geoffry Lucas & Sidney Cranfield) also submitted plans.

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