James William Wild

James William Wild
Wild at the start of the Lepsius expedition in Egypt, 1842. Drawing by J.J. Frey.
Born	(1814-03-09)9 March 1814 Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England
Died	7 November 1892(1892-11-07) (aged 78) Sir John Soane's Museum, London
Nationality	United Kingdom
Occupation	Architect

James William Wild (9 March 1814 – 7 November 1892) was a British architect. Initially working in the Gothic style, he later employed round-arched forms. He spent several years in Egypt. He acted as decorative architect to the Great Exhibition of 1851, and designed the Grimsby Dock Tower, completed in 1852. After a considerable break in his career he worked on designs for the South Kensington Museum, and designed the British embassy in Tehran. He was curator of the Sir John Soane's Museum from 1878 until his death in 1892.

Wild was born in Lincoln, the son of the watercolourist Charles Wild.

Wild was to the architect George Basevi from 1830. After his apprenticeship, he concentrated on Gothic design, and was entrusted with the design of a country church. He was subsequently engaged on many other church projects, and six churches had been built to his design before 1840.

Commissioned to build a new church at Streatham on a limited budget – construction was intended to cost around £4,000 although the expenditure eventually rose to around £6,000 – Wild abandoned the medieval English styles he had used for his earlier churches, for a design in a spare, round-arched style, based on an eclectic range of sources from around the Mediterranean. The church was built of brick, with, unusually for the date, some brick polychrome decoration, although sparingly used. It has a tall slim Italian-style campanile, with a small pyramidal spire. A contemporary reviewer wrote that "it has been called Moorish, Byzantine, Arabian, &c, but we incline to think that it may more justly claim the title of 'Italian' than that Palladian modification which has so long monopolized that title in England."

Wild is not known to have travelled abroad by this time, but in developing this new style he would have been able to draw on the advice of friends who had, such as Owen Jones (who married Wild's sister Isabella shortly after) and Joseph and Ignatius Bonomi He would also have been able to consult recently published sources such as Jones' study of the Alhambra, a building from which some details at Streatham seem directly copied. Wild showed the design for Christ Church at the Royal Academy in 1840, along with another for a church at Paddington (which was never built), in a Lombardic style, with western tower and a central cupola.