George Ledwell Taylor

George Ledwell Taylor (31 March 1788 – 1 May 1873) was an architect and landowner who lived in London.

Taylor was born on 31 March 1788 and educated at Rawes's academy, Bromley. He became a pupil of the architect James Burton, and on Burton's retirement, of Joseph Parkinson, who was then engaged in laying out the Portman estate. While articled to Parkinson, Taylor superintended the building of Montagu and Bryanston Squares (1811), and the neighbouring streets.

In 1816 went on two walking tours of England with his fellow-pupil Edward Cresy. In 1817 he and Cresy set off on a grand tour, visiting France, Switzerland and Italy, before spending a summer in Greece. At Pisa, they made a detailed survey of the Campo Santo and the Leaning Tower; later publishing the drawings in a volume called Architecture of the Middle Ages in Italy (1829). On their return to England, Taylor and Cresy set up an office in Furnival's Inn. Taylor lived at 52 Bedford Square and, afterwards in Spring Gardens, later moving to a villa at Lee Terrace, Blackheath, one of a group of four he had designed himself.

On 8 June 1820 he married Bella Neufville, by whom he had eleven children.

In 1824 he was appointed surveyor of buildings to the naval department. In this capacity he superintended important works in the dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich, and Sheerness, and alterations to the Clarence victualling yard at Gosport. His work at Sheerness include the neoclassical Royal Dockyard Church of 1828. The works he carried out at Chatham included the construction of the Melville Hospital (1827) and the underpinning with concrete of the Long Storehouse, which had been destabilised by decay of the timbers which served as its foundations. He presented a paper on the subject of this “experimental system of undersetting” at a meeting of the Institute of British Architects in 1836. At Woolwich, he built the river wall (1831).

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