Google Earth Community: Richard Harding Watt

Richard Harding Watt

(1842–1913)
Richard Harding Watt was an English creator of buildings out of architectural features collected from demolition contractors. He worked with clay models to convey his ideas to executive architects (including Walter Aston (1861–1905), John Brooke (1853–1914), Harry Smith Fairhurst (1868–1945), J. H. France (fl. early C20), and W. Longworth (fl. early C20), and created a series of very remarkable and original buildings in Knutsford, Cheshire, in the years before the 1914–18 war.

Any money Watt had to spend creating his buildings came from his business as a glove merchant, importing mainly from France and Italy and trading from Manchester and Glasgow. The facts of his life are obscure but he was born in Manchester about 1842 and later lived in Bowdon where he met his wife, Ethel Armitage, who was 18 years younger than him.

The buildings of Richard Harding Watt have lent an exotic air to Knutsford and from certain aspects have created something like an Italian hillside town landscape.

Among his most extraordinary works are the Gaskell Memorial Tower with the adjacent King's Coffee House (1907–8), the Old Croft (1895—with tower of 1907), Moorgarth (1898), the Ruskin Rooms and Cottages (1899–1902), Swinton Square (1902), cottages in Drury Lane, houses in Legh Road, and the laundry in Knutsford Mere (all c.1904). Stylistically, the buildings tend to the Italianate, Classical, and the exotic about them.

Knutsford is an attractive old market town which was at one time a staging post on the Liverpool to London road. Knutsford was listed in Domesday as ‘Cunetesford’ – possibly after the famous ruler Canute.. In 1282, the places was recorded as ‘Knottisford’. Edward I granted the town’s charter in 1292.

A network of narrow streets connect Knutsford’s two main streets Toft Road containing a thatched pub and King Street. The narrow King Street contains many interesting old houses, some of them half timbered. The narrow pavements date from the end of the 18th century when Lady Stanley gave money for them – she insisted they were only one stone wide to prevent couples walking arm in arm which she disapproved of. When she died, she left money for ‘flags in Knutsford’ but the council wanted to decorate the town in honour of Queen Victoria, so they interpreted the term broadly and spent the money on banners rather than flagstones.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Cranford was based on the daily lives of the people who lived in Knutsford in the middle of the 19th century. The author also portrayed the town in her novels ‘Wives and Daughters’ and ‘Ruth’. Elizabeth was born in London but was sent to live with her aunts in the quiet place of ‘elegant economies’ when her mother died. She is buried in the churchyard of the Unitarian Chapel.

Knutsford was home to the highwayman Edward Higgins. In 1754 he was tried for housebreaking in Worcester and transported to America. Using money from his crimes there he returned to England and socialised with the local gentry – mainly to gather information for his housebreaking activities. Sentenced to death in Carmarthen, he produced an official pardon which the authorities realised was a forgery. He was hanged in 1767.

Richard Harding Watt built the Ruskin Rooms in Drury Lane, as a meeting place for discussions and lectures on mind improving topics. They were financed by a laundry in an adjacent building with a chimney built to resemble a mosque minaret. The laundry is now closed and the chimney demolished as unsafe. Watt also produced Italian-looking villas in Legh Road.

Stephen Spielberg could not find anywhere in Singapore that looked like old Singapore for his film ‘Empire of the Sun’, so he chose Legh Road with the addition of bamboo fences!

This collection of placemarks contains the locations of building built by Richard Harding Watt

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