Edward Schroeder Prior RA (1852–1932) was a British architect, instrumental in establishing the Arts and Crafts movement.

He was one of the foremost theorists of the second generation of the movement, writing extensively on architecture, art, craftsmanship and the building process and subsequently influencing the training of many architects.

Initially his buildings show the influence of his mentor Norman Shaw and Philip Webb, but Prior experimented with materials, massing and volume from the start of his independent practice.

He developed a style that was intensely individual and a practical philosophy of construction that was perhaps nearer to Ruskin's ideal of the "builder designer" than that of any other arts and crafts architect.

Edward Schroeder Prior was born in Greenwich on 4 January 1852, his parents' fourth son, one of eleven children.

His father John Venn Prior, who was a barrister in the Chancery division, died at the age of 43 as a result of a fall from a horse.

Here his interest in natural history, art, architecture and science was fostered, particularly by F. W. Farrar, H. M. Butler and B. F. Westcott, his housemaster and private tutor.

Colvin, a friend of Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was elected Slade Professor in January 1873.

The St George's Art Society grew out of the discussions held amongst Shaw's circle at Newton's Hart Street offices.

His early commissions were primarily located in areas where he had connections, in Harrow and around Bridport in Dorset, where his father had lived and his mother's relatives, the Templers, were prominent inhabitants, and in Cambridge where he had been at university.

Whilst designing Pier Terrace at West Bay, Prior met Louisa Maunsell, the daughter of the vicar of nearby Symondsbury.

In 1894 Prior moved to 10 Melina Place, St John's Wood, next door to Voysey, resulting in the development of a long term friendship and exchange of ideas between the two men, to the extent that Voysey is recorded as having painted the roofs of Prior's seminal Model for a Dorsetshire Cottage.

Prior played a crucial role in the establishment of the Guilds that were the intellectual focus of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

At the October 1883 meeting it was decided that it would be preferable to found a new organisation that would bring together "craftsmen in Architecture, Painting, Sculpture and the kindred Arts."

Prior wrote in November 1883, Painters, Sculptors, and Architects are in danger of settling permanently into three distinct professions, oblivious of one another's aims.

A Society is wanted to restore their former union with one another with a programme of cohesion such as the Royal Academy hardly now suggests, and which the Institute of British Architects has deliberately rejected.After various consultations invitations were sent out to 24 artists including members of The Fifteen, founded by the designer and writer Lewis Day and the illustrator and designer Walter Crane and others, such as J. D. Sedding, Ernest George and Basil Champneys.

Various names for the group were proposed and Prior's suggestion of the "Art Workers Guild" was accepted at the meeting of 11 March 1884.

[3] The Guild was highly influential on the architecture of the Arts and Crafts Movement, but Prior remained only a minor player for some time, until he was elected to the governing committee in 1889.

He was also able to call on the skills of a wide range of craft practitioners from the Guild for the design and construction of furniture for many of his buildings.

His involvement with the Clergy and Artists' Association of 1896, set up to improve the links between patron and producer, led directly to commissions for example for the lych gate at Methley Church.

The protest against examination and registration was launched by the Art Workers Guild, whose members believed, quite correctly, that RIBA wished to establish itself as the sole arbiter of the profession culminating in the publication of a collection of essays Architecture: A Profession or an Art in 1892, to which Prior contributed a chapter criticising the common use of "hirelings" to do the architect's work.

[1] His obituary in the Architect and Building News perhaps best summed him up: And he could be something of a grizzly old bear at times, for he was pertinacious and his opinion once formed was hardly to be changed.

Yet it was a kindly bear withal, that would emerge, honours divided, from a wordy warfare with a joyous twinkle in its eye; and for any small personal attention or service, it could be immensely grateful and appreciative.