the wellington college year book 2010/2011
118
obiter dicta
pat r i c k m i l e h a m [ a 1 9 5 9 – 1 9 6 3 ]
first design for ‘a wellington college’ 1853
T
he original buildings of
Wellington College are
known as the work of a
Victorian architect John
Shaw. Apart from the
cheerful aspects of North Front, South Front,
Great School and the soaring twin towers of
‘The Wellington College’, built in an eclectic
style all of its own, John Shaw is not well known
as an architect. Other than our College,
his most notable public building is what is
now Goldsmiths’ College in South London.
We have now discovered a fact, hitherto
never recorded in any of the histories
of Wellington College or architectural
commentaries (like Pevsner). Before our John
Shaw ever got to work, another, and much
more famous man of the same surname, R.
Norman Shaw, won the Royal Academy Prize
for Architecture in 1853, for the design of ‘A
Wellington College’.
The print shown here has been found
in The Illustrated London News, of shortly
before the Royal Charter was granted by
the Queen in December of that year, which
shows a staggering Classical building of vast
proportions, similar to Wren’s conceptions
of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Naval
Hospital (later College) at Greenwich. St
Paul’s is already connected with Wellington
College, while Greenwich is a building of
‘outstanding universal value? the finest
…?
and most dramatically sited architectural
and landscape ensemble in the British Isles’,
according to unesco. Tout ensemble the
design rivalled the buildings atop Capitol
Hill, Washington?! The caption specifies that
it was to be for ‘1,000 cadets and requisite
officers and masters’, although the term
‘cadets’?—?unequivocal military?—?had never
been mentioned as an intention in the
Charter and previous national debate about a