Queen Anne Revival architecture in the United Kingdom

British Queen Anne Revival architecture, also known as Domestic Revival, is a style of building using red brick, white woodwork, and an eclectic mixture of decorative features, that became popular in the 1870s, both for houses and for larger buildings such as offices, hotels, and town halls. It was popularised by Norman Shaw (1831–1912) and George Devey (1820–1886). It supposedly revives the original style of Queen Anne architecture, though this is often far from the case.

Beginnings

The Queen Anne Revival was to a large extent anticipated by George Frederick Bodley, George Gilbert Scott, Norman Shaw, W. Eden Nesfield, J. J. Stevenson, and Philip Webb in the 1860s; they had used and mixed together brick pediments and pilasters, fan-lights, ribbed chimneys, Flemish or plain gables, hipped roofs, wrought-iron railings, sash windows, outside shutters, asymmetry and even sunflower decorations.

Features

The Queen Anne Revival style has, as the architectural historian Mark Girouard writes,

comparatively little to do with Queen Anne. It was the nickname applied to a style which became enormously popular in the 1870s and survived into the early years of this century. 'Queen Anne' came with red brick and white-painted sash windows, with curly pedimented gables and delicate brick panels of sunflowers, swags, or cherubs, with small window panes, steep roofs, and curving bay windows, with wooden balconies and little fancy oriels jutting out where one would least expect them. It was a kind of architectural cocktail, with a little genuine Queen Anne in it, a little Dutch, a little Flemish, a squeeze of Robert Adam, a generous dash of Wren, and a touch of François 1er."

All of these features can be seen in houses, large or small, of the later part of the Victorian era.

Architects

Norman Shaw

Characteristic features of Shaw's houses, well seen in the Bedford Park garden suburb in west London alongside the work of other contemporary architects interpreting the Queen Anne Revival style, are red brick, walls hung with tiles, gables of varying shapes, balconies, bay windows, terracotta and rubbed brick decorations, pediments, elaborate chimneys, and balustrades painted white.

Shaw's eclectic designs freely combined Arts & Crafts, Georgian, medieval, Tudor, and Wren styles.