Judgement, Taste, Propriety and Economy or The Elements of Success in Architectural Practice in Victorian England's Manufacturing Towns: the Case of Mallinson and Healey of Halifax and Bradford

This thesis constitutes the first study of the Mallinson and Healey architectural partnership of 1845-1862/3, which dominated the building of churches, schools and parsonages in the west of the West Riding during the most contested phase of the Gothic Revival. Extant day-books from 1854 to 1857 allow detailed examination of the minutiae of the partners' working lives and practices and the conditions for professional success in Britain's early Victorian manufacturing towns. The study fills a number of gaps in the existing knowledge of how provincial architects operated in this period, and challenges the tendency to treat provincial architecture as merely a pale imitation of its metropolitan counterpart or to confine attention almost entirely to descriptions of buildings and their architectural styles, with little or no account of the particular constraints and opportunities that moulded them. A clear focus on the practice of architecture in all its elements avoids some of these shortcomings and demonstrates that the provincial architect's business differed from that of his metropolitan confrére, not simply in degree, but in kind. These differences included the need to avoid factionalism and to be acceptable to everyone within thirty miles who might discover a desire to build, a willingness to work long hours coupled with a consciousness of the importance of providing a local service in small jobs as well as large since one often led to the other, a readiness to assist the client in the raising of capital (e.g. through grant applications), a reputation for the effective use of money by concentrating on essentials and avoiding gimcrack attempts to reach beyond the budget, and a knowledge of the vagaries of ecclesiological fashion held in subjection to sound construction and a contemporary understanding of originality. This was the formula for success and Mallinson and Healey had discovered it.