John Norton (28 September 1823 – 10 November 1904) was an English architect who designed country houses, churches and a number of commercial buildings.
Early life
Norton was born and educated in Bristol. He became the pupil of architect Benjamin Ferrey (1810–80) in 1846. Ferrey was an early member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a close friend of the designer Augustus Pugin (1812–52), who took his inspiration from the Gothic medieval styles of the pre-Reformation era. Ferrey's association with Pugin had a profound effect upon Norton, who adopted Pugin's principles and Christian moral dimensions in his own subsequent designs for church architecture. The vital tenets of Pugin's and thus Norton's creed were centred on the revival of the pointed structure of the Gothic arch.
It was argued that only this construction truly symbolised Christian striving towards heaven and Christ's resurrection, Classical architecture having been based on pagan temples. Furthermore, that '...there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety,...all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building...[and that] in pure architecture the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose.'
Career
Pugin died in 1852 at the time that Norton, not yet 30, was to embark upon a succession of Gothic revivalist designs for parish churches throughout Somerset. He also worked in Gloucestershire, restoring the 13th-century Church of St Mary and St Peter, Tidenham in 1858. Ferrey had continued to maintain a thriving architectural practice in the west of England and had been appointed honorary architect to the Diocese of Bath and Wells. Norton, although now based in London also maintained a Bristol office.
Norton's association with Sir Peregrine Acland, who donated the £16,000 necessary to rebuild the former mediaeval church of St. Audries, bore further fruit with the commission to design Stogursey School in 1860. This was undertaken by Norton with his now customary flamboyance and dedication to the ideals of Gothic revivalism, and was constructed from local Quantock stone with Bath stone dressings. The school stands in use today.
In accordance with Ferrey and Pugin's prescient concerns for the inter-relationship of humanity and the environment it produces, Norton's designs called for the sourcing of construction materials from their locality. Holy Trinity, Stapleton, was built from pennant stone quarried from nearby Broomhill dressed in stone from Bath. St. Audries from red sandstone quarried from nearby Stampford Brett, and Holy Trinity, Walton, from the hard underlying blue lias, a sedimentary Jurassic limestone quarried from Somerton, just five miles from the church site.
In addition to the regular ecclesiastical commissions, Norton's London practice had designed the grand residences that line Crystal Palace Road in Sydenham. The sale of these properties partly financed the park which had been laid out to display Paxton's Crystal Palace, reconstructed from the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Work on country residences
Later that decade, Norton's reputation was enhanced with commissions to build Nutley Priory near Redhill, (Surrey), for the banker E.H.Gurney, Brent Knoll in the West Country for G.S.Poole, and Chewton Magna Manor for W.Adlam.
John Norton's greatest commission was now on the horizon. William Gibbs (1790–1875) had become a partner in the family trading company and by the time of Queen Victoria's accession in 1837 had, with his brother Henry, circumspectly steered their business through the French Wars and the dissolution of Spanish colonial interests. William became sole owner in 1842 and the following 40 years produced annual profits that would have reached beyond his ancestors' imagining. Gibbs' Peruvian office had secured contracts for the export to Britain of guano, the nitrogen-rich deposits of seabird droppings that became a principal fertiliser for the increase of wheat yields.
William Gibbs now required a country seat for his family away from London and in 1843 purchased Tyntes Place, an attractive house with relatively simple and plain internal decoration that overlooked the Bristol Channel. The house had been rebuilt to the conservative tastes of a Reverend Seymour and further improved by Nailsea architect Robert Newton after 1836. During the 1850s the celebrated designer John Gregory Crace (1809–89), who had worked closely with Augustus Pugin, was commissioned by Gibbs to make improvements to the London house at 16 Hyde Park Gardens, and also to refurbish Tyntesfield House, as it was now officially referred to.