(b Clapham, London, 22 May 1849; d London, 21 Aug 1930). English architect. After attending school in Brighton, he was articled for five years from 1866 with Banks & Barry, London, while also attending classes at the Architectural Association. He established his own practice in 1873 and was soon joined by Edward Ingress Bell (1836-1914), whose precise role in the partnership has always been a slight mystery. Their first large venture came with their successful competition design of 1885 for the Victoria Law Courts in Birmingham: a structure clad in terracotta, with rich detailing, completed in 1891. There followed a number of smaller works in London: 23 Austin Friars; 13-15 Moorgate (1890-93), in a Franco-Flemish style; the French Protestant Church, Soho Square (1891-3); and the Royal United Services Institution, Whitehall (1893-5), with its cherubic figures by William Silver Frith (1850-1924). In 1890 Webb began a major restoration of the church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield, and built one of his few residential works, referred to by Nikolaus Pevsner as the 'astonishing Jacobean fantasy', Yeaton-Peverey House (1890-92), near Shrewsbury, Salop. Webb also contributed three major buildings in South Kensington, London. The first, won in an invited competition (1891), was for a major addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum with a fa?ade to Cromwell Road. With this design, Webb stretched his talent for mixing Renaissance styles to its limit, creating a skyline broken by pavilion domes, campaniles and, at the centre of the principal fa?ade, a column-tiered tower supporting an open crown. Webb's other two buildings in South Kensington, the Chemistry and Physics Building (1898-1906; destr.) for the Royal College of Science and Technology and the Royal School of Mines (1908-13), Prince Consort Road, were very much in the restrained French classicism of the late 18th century admired in the Edwardian period.

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