Adrian Scott Stokes

(b Southport, Lancs, 1858; d London, 25 Dec 1925). English architect. He was the brother of the painter and critic Adrian Scott Stokes (1854-1935) and the nephew of S. N. Stokes (1821-91), a founder-member of the Cambridge Camden Society, who became a Roman Catholic. He came to London as a pupil of the Catholic church architect S. J. Nicholl (1826-1905). He was later a clerk of works under G. E. Street and an assistant to T. E. Collcutt, Bodley & Garner and J. P. St Aubyn (1815-95). He won the Pugin travelling scholarship in 1880 and toured Germany and Italy in 1881-2. He established himself as one of the most innovative church architects of the day with St Clare (1880-90), Sefton Park, Liverpool, where his use of internal buttresses, wall passages and a free Decorated Gothic style all contrasted sharply with the conservatism of much late 19th-century Catholic church architecture. His unexecuted scheme (1892) for Corpus Christi, Miles Platting, Manchester, continued this freedom with a richness derived from the Arts and Crafts Movement. St Clare was followed by a number of smaller brick churches, typical of which are Our Lady Help of Christians (1889-90), Folkestone, Kent, and St Augustine (1893-4; now Our Lady and St John), Sudbury, Suffolk. His Church of the Holy Ghost (1896-7; altered), Nightingale Square, Balham, London, was his most unusual design, asymmetrical in plan, with nave piers and capitals stripped of traditional mouldings. All Souls' (1895-6), Peterborough, Cambs, and St Joseph (1907-11), Pickering, N. Yorks, are large stone churches with presbyteries. He built a number of schools and convents, and the free-style classical Nazareth House (1893-4; 1900 and later) at Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, has his characteristic large segmental-arched mullioned windows. His best convent was for Anglican nuns, All Saints' (1899-1903; now All Saints' Pastoral Centre), London Colney, Herts, in a free, domestic, Late Gothic style, with Renaissance and 17th-century details, using carefully contrasted panels of brick and stone dressings and tiles in a rectilinear manner. The gate-tower motif and large quadrangular ranges are continued at the new schools at Downside Abbey (1907-11; half the scheme was built), Somerset, and the library (extended 1930; now the lecture theatre) and North Court (1910-14) of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Stokes built about 20 highly individual telephone exchanges following his marriage in 1898 to the daughter of the managing director of the National Telephone Company. The best exchange was that in Gerrard Street, Soho, London (1904; destr.), with its arcaded ground floor and mullioned and transomed upper-floor windows, banded walls and late 17th-century details. There are surviving offices (1913-14) at Golden Square, Soho, London. The themes of his commercial and convent architecture are apparent in his domestic work such as the large, eclectic Minterne (1903-5), Dorset, for the 10th Lord Digby. His own house (1899), 2 West Drive, Streatham, London, is, by contrast, Early Georgian in inspiration. Late works include the baroque fa?ade (1910; unfinished) of St Wilfrid's Hall, Brompton Oratory, London, and Georgetown Roman Catholic Cathedral (1914-25), Demerara, Guyana. He retired because of ill health in 1914, and his practice was continued by George Drysdale (1881-1949). He avoided the mystical aspects of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and it was reported that 'he always drew contours himself'.

See the Abbreviations for further details.