Edward Robert Robson

Edward Robert Robson FRIBA FSA FSI (2 March 1836 – 19 January 1917) was an English architect famous for the progressive spirit of his London state-funded school buildings of the 1870s and early 1880s.

Born in Durham, he was the elder son of Robert Robson, a Durham Justice of the Peace. He apprenticed in Newcastle upon Tyne with John Dobson, who worked in a classicising, Italianate manner; he then worked under Sir George Gilbert Scott (1854–59) during the restoration of Durham Cathedral's tower, taking a break in 1858 for "extensive Continental travel", and went on to serve as architect in charge of the Cathedral for six years. He was also in partnership for a time prior to 20 August 1862 with John Wilson Walton (c. 1822–1910). His first church, St. Cuthbert's, Durham (1863), was inspired in part by the plain 13th-century church at Formigny, Normandy. For some time he served as architect and surveyor to the city of Liverpool, which served to give him sufficient experience when he was the surprising choice as chief architect for the newly erected School Board of London, in 1871. He became a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Under the terms of the reforming Elementary Education Act 1870, a great number of new state-funded schools had to be built as quickly as possible, especially in the East End. Robson's experience, for which he travelled in the Continent for the most up-to-date school-planning ideas, was encapsulated in his School Architecture (1874). For the workload, he formed a partnership with J. J. Stevenson from 1871 until 1876. The schools themselves were of brick and architectural terracotta in the many-gabled free Anglo-Flemish Renaissance style known at the time as "Queen Anne style", which Robson chose as more suitably enlightened and secular than Gothic Revival and in which Stevenson had already shown himself proficient.

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