Edgar Wood

Edgar Wood (1860–1935) was an architect, artist and draftsman who practised from Manchester at the turn of the 20th century and gained a considerable reputation in the United Kingdom. He was regarded as a proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement which was prevalent between 1860 and 1910.

Wood's work is principally domestic, but he designed several churches and small commercial buildings. He worked as an individual designer, mostly with only one assistant, and confined himself to the smaller type of building that he could control personally. Although he was active in Manchester for over twenty years, most of his work is in nearby towns, such as Rochdale, Oldham and Middleton (of which he was native), and in outlying districts such as Bramhall and Hale.

He contributed to Manchester in various ways. He was a founder of the Northern Art Workers' Guild in 1896, one of the major provincial societies within the Arts and Crafts Movement and was president of the Manchester Society of Architects from 1911–12. Wood retired in 1921 and twenty one of his architectural works are listed.

Edgar Wood was born on 17 May 1860. He was 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 was educated at the local Queen Elizabeth Grammar School.

The direction of Edgar'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.

Edgar 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."

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