Townsend became a member of the Art Workers' Guild in 1888 and in the same year was elected a Fellow of the more conservative Royal Institute of British Architects.
Townsend's career was devoted mainly to domestic and small-scale ecclesiastical commissions, but his reputation rests principally on three strikingly original public buildings in London: Bishopsgate Institute (1892–94); the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1895–99, opened 1901); and the Horniman Museum (1898–1901).
[2] Pevsner describes the buildings as "without question the most remarkable example of a reckless repudiation of tradition among English architects of the time".
[3] The Horniman Museum in particular moved a contemporary observer, writing in 1902, the year after the building was opened, to hail it as "a new series of frank and fearless thoughts expressed and co-ordinated in stone".
[5] Notable among Townsend's other works are: All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, London (now the Russian Orthodox Cathedral) (1892); the picturesque St. Martin, Blackheath, Surrey (which is apparently modelled on an Italian wayside chapel) (1893); the United Free Church, Woodford Green (1901), and St. Mary the Virgin, Great Warley, Essex (1902).