Amon Henry Wilds
He was part of a team of three architects and builders who—working together or independently at different times—were almost solely responsible for a surge in residential construction and development in early 19th-century Brighton, which until then had been a small but increasingly fashionable seaside resort on the East Sussex coast.
[4][5] Although he still had some involvement with his father and Busby's work, his own projects took up more of his time over the next 25 years: Oriental Place, Sillwood Place, Western Terrace, Hanover Crescent, Park Crescent, the Royal Newburgh Assembly Rooms and the Royal Albion Hotel all still exist and are listed buildings.
His scheme for a new town at Milton, a neighbouring parish, in the 1820s was not carried out, but in 1836 he designed Gravesend Town Hall in the Classical style (both the building and the adjacent High Street are dominated by its "noble Greek Doric tetrastyle portico"), and between 1838 and 1841 he designed triumphal arch-style entrance lodges and a chapel at Gravesend Cemetery.
At both Kemp Town and other locations he worked at, architectural devices and features characteristic of Wilds junior can be seen: Egyptian-style flourishes and scallop designs inlaid into stuccoed walls above windows in his earlier days, and a move towards the Italianate style when that became popular later.
This was a type of Ionic capital used to decorate the top of pilasters and columns; it took the spiral shape of an ammonite fossil.
[5] Brighton Unitarian Church, a Grade II*-listed building,[24] was built early in Wilds junior's architectural career.
[25] It was intended to resemble the Temple of Thesæus in Athens,[12][25] and has an enormous tetrastyle portico of four Doric columns beneath a pediment.
[26] Six years later, a merchant named Charles Elliott acquired the right to build a proprietary chapel on land belonging to the 3rd Earl of Egremont east of Brighton; Wilds junior created another Classical-style design for the new St Mary the Virgin Church.
He proposed an Oriental-style garden with a tall, steam-heated glasshouse called the Athenaeum, a library, museum and school, all surrounded by high-class houses.
[31][32] Wilds junior also built Hanover Crescent, to the northeast of Brighton off the Lewes Road, on behalf of a speculator—this time, local entrepreneur Henry Brooker.
He felt that property speculation would be profitable even in areas further away from the town centre, such was Brighton's growing popularity in the Regency era, so he bought a set of strips of farmland in 1814 and commissioned Wilds junior to build a crescent-shaped façade and the shells of houses; buyers could then add internal fittings as they wished.
[5][13][37] Following the success of his work in Brighton, Wilds was commissioned to design a new crescent for the growing seaside town of Worthing, 11 miles west along the coast.
[39] Built between 1843 and 1847[40] in the Seven Dials area, whose development had been stimulated by the recent opening of the nearby railway station, it was laid out as a curving terrace of mansions, each divided into two dwellings.
[43][44][45][46] In 1820 or 1826, Wilds (possibly in conjunction with Busby) rebuilt a terraced house on Castle Square to form the Royal Pavilion Tavern.
