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.

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.Arthur Aikin and Charles Rochemont Aikin were his brothers, the writer Lucy Aikin was his sister, and Anna Barbauld was his aunt. In 1784 the family moved to Great Yarmouth, where his father practised as a doctor, and then, in 1792, to Broad Street Buildings in London. Aikin suffered from a speech impediment and was educated almost entirely at home by his parents.

He was articled to a builder and surveyor, and following his apprenticeship, set up in business as an architect and surveyor on his own account. Two early designs were for nonconformist chapels in London. In 1808, he designed one in Jewin Street, off Aldersgate Street in the City of London, where Abraham Rees was minister for many years. 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 1806 he was a founder-member of the London Architectural Society. 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. In 1812 he presented his Essay on the Doric Order to the London Architectural Society. He also wrote an account of St. Paul's Cathedral to accompany a set of drawings by James Elmes, articles about architecture for Abraham Rees Cyclopaedia, and a section on architecture for his sister Lucy's book about the reign of Elizabeth I. He exhibited designs at the Royal Academy between 1804 and 1814.

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