John Shaw, Sr.

John Shaw, Sr. (1776–1832) was an English architect related to the Shaw and Hardwick family, and one of the first architects to draw up plans for semi-detached housing in London. He was architect to Christ's Hospital in London, and to the Port of Ramsgate. Many of his works, including the church of St Dunstan-in the West in Fleet Street, London, were in a Gothic Revival style.

Shaw was born in Bexley, Kent in 1776. His father, also named John Shaw, was a surgeon, and his mother, Elizabeth Latham, was from a wealthy landowning family. He moved to Southwark, Surrey and trained under the architect George Gwilt the elder. It is thought that Shaw and Gwilt were related as Gwilt had married a Sarah Shaw, and it is quite possible that the two architects were cousins.

In 1799 Shaw married a cousin, Elizabeth Hester Whitfield, who was from a missionary family, at St George's, Hanover Square, in London

Shaw worked with Humphrey Repton, remodelling Lord Uxbridge's property at Beaudesert, and was later employed to redesign parts of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire by Colonel Thomas Wildman who had just bought the estate from Lord Byron. Between 1821 and 1826 he rebuilt Ilam Hall in Staffordshire in the Gothic style for the manufacturer Jesse Watts Russell.

In 1816 Shaw was appointed architect to Christ's Hospital school, then sited in Newgate Street in the City of London. In 1825 the governors of the school asked him to build a new great hall for the school. He employed a gothic style, with buttresses, battlements and pinnacles, designing a large rectangular building, with octagonal towers housing staircases at either end. The Great Hall itself, 187 feet (57 m) long, was on the upper floor, lit by nine large windows filling the spaces between the buttresses. Various other functions were housed in ground floor and basement. Along the front of the ground floor, facing Newgate Street, was an open granite arcade 200 feet (61 m) long, built of granite. The upper parts of this frontage were of Portland stone, while the rest of the building was brick.Charles Locke Eastlake commented

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