The Parish of St
Augustine of Canterbury
Highgate, London, UK
Church of England
John Dando Sedding was
born on 13th April, 1838 at Eton in Berkshire, England, but spent much of
his youth in north Derbyshire where his father was a village schoolmaster.
In about 1858 he began his training as an architect in the office of
George Edmund Street alongside fellow pupils who included William Morris
and Philip Webb, and where Richard Norman Shaw also was working as
Street’s chief assistant. His elder brother, Edmund, had also trained as
an architect with Street and had settled in Penzance, Cornwall, where he
set up in practice as an architect and John joined him there in about
1865. Edmund suffered from ill health and died in 1868.
After his brother’s death, John Sedding continued the practice, operating
from both Penzance and Bristol before moving to London in 1875. He had
been elected a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects the
previous year and became a member of the Art Workers’ Guild in 1884, the
year of its foundation.
He was one of the first architects of the Gothic Revival to appreciate the
beauty of late Gothic or Perpendicular architecture and gave London one of
its first churches to be built in the Classical style since the time of
Wren in Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell. He gained a reputation for being a
sympathetic restorer of old churches, particularly in Cornwall, Devon and
Somerset. He liked to work with the same team of craftsmen whenever
possible, training them in his ways: the firms of William Bone of Liskeard
and Charles Trask from near Ilminster appear frequently in the list of his
works. He also favoured employing artists to decorate his churches rather
than filling them with the products of commercial church furnishers. In
his best known church, Holy Trinity, Chelsea, begun in 1888 and still
unfinished at the time of his death, furnishings and fittings were
supplied by or intended to be supplied by many of the leading sculptors
and painters of the Arts and Crafts movement.
He died on 7th April 1891.
Biographical information by Paul Howarth
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