Egyptian Revival architecture in the British Isles

In the later 18th century, mausoleums started to be built based on pyramids, and sphinxes were used as decorative features associated with monuments or mounted on gate piers.

As a result of the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt in 1798, more accurate records became available to architects and Egyptian Revival became a recognised architectural style.

[1] Detailed renderings of various temples on the Nile, the Pyramids, and the Sphinx had been accumulating for connoisseurs and designers in works such as Bernard de Montfaucon's, ten-volume L'Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures (1719–1724), which reproduces, methodically grouped, all the ancient monuments.

Also of importance were the engravings of Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778), which included, in his defence of Roman forms, a place for Egypt as a primary source.

Travellers from Britain, such as Richard Pococke, who published in 1743 A Description of the East and Some Other Countries were also a source for popularising Egyptian architecture.

The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, commissioned by William Bullock as a museum to house his collection of curiosities was completed in 1812.

[8] This was a further stimulus to public interest in Egyptian art and architecture and coincided with the use by civil engineers in using pylons for suspension bridges, chain piers and the furnaces at Lord Bute's Ironworks at Rhymney in south Wales.

Hay and Bonomi stayed in Egypt from November 1824 until 1828, and 1829 to 1834, recording monuments and inscriptions, and making a large number of architectural plans.

He is especially known for a prolific series of detailed lithograph prints of Egypt and the Near East that he produced from sketches he made during long tours of the region between 1838 and 1840.

The chief result of this expedition was the publication of Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien (Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia),[10] a massive twelve-volume compendia of nearly 900 plates of ancient Egyptian inscriptions, as well as accompanying commentary and descriptions published in 1849.

[12] General Sir David Baird's obelisk, near Crieff, erected 1832 Stone pyramids were occasionally used as funerary Mausoleum from the late 17th century onwards.

The inspiration is likely to have been a pyramid built in Rome, about 18–12 BC, as a tomb for Gaius Cestius, a magistrate and member of the Septemviri Epulonum.

In 1783 a pyramid was added to an otherwise classical mausoleum designed by James Wyatt for the Darnley family at Cobham Park in Kent.

Then in 1794–96 a pyramid mausoleum by the Italian architect Joseph Bonomi for William Assheton Harbord in Blickling Park in Norfolk.

The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, commissioned by William Bullock as a museum to house his collection of curiosities was completed in 1812 at a cost of £16,000.

[15] Most of Foulston's work was in the Greek Revival style, but his best known project was the creation of a group of buildings in Ker Street, Devonport in 1821–24.

In his Guide to Penzance, published in 1845, J S Courtney describes the building as ... the astonishing gaudy and eccentric Egyptian House recently built by John Lavin, mineralogist and Egyptologist.

Although worship no longer takes place in the building, its theatre-like design has made it a popular venue for concerts and musical events.

Work started on the Egyptian Halls in March 1870 to provide new commercial premises for James Robertson, an iron manufacturer; and was completed in 1872.

The cemetery, with its Greek Doric and Egyptian style buildings, were designed by Sheffield architect Samuel Worth (1779–1870) on the site of a former quarry.

Completed in around 1840, with offices added two years later, its vast single-storey weaving shed was described by some as the "single largest room in the world".

Battered clasping buttress to each corner, and two set close together towards centre of each long side, all running into deep brick plat band under eaves.

Truncated projecting brick stack, formerly tall and tapering, filling most of east gable end, with cornice carried round it and bearing the initial "P".

These Keepers' cottages were to service the Skerryvore lighthouse on a remote reef that lies off the west coast of Scotland, 12 miles (19 kilometres) south-west of the island of Tiree.

The building was erected in 1926–28 by the Carreras Tobacco Company owned by the Russian-Jewish inventor and philanthropist Bernhard Baron on the communal garden area of Mornington Crescent, to a design by architects M. E. and O. H. Collins and A. G. Porri.

It is 550 feet (168 metres) long, and is mainly white, The building's distinctive Egyptian-style ornamentation originally included a solar disc to the Sun-god Ra, two gigantic effigies of black cats flanking the entrance and colourful painted details.

When the factory was converted into offices in 1961 the Egyptian detailing was lost, but it was restored during a renovation in the late 1990s and replicas of the cats were placed outside the entrance.

[40] The former Duncan's chocolate factory in Beaverhall Road, Powderhall, Edinburgh appears to have been built in the 1920s and is most notable for the frieze of Egyptian deities on its facade.

The building was designed by architect Joseph Gomersall and boasted an Egyptian exterior and interior, including an organ that featured pharaonic heads on either side, together with lotus columns and a winged music stand.

The interior sat 1,200, and although described as having stalls and balcony, the front of the 'balcony' came right down to the rear of the 'stalls' level, with a wooden dividing wall to keep the separate areas apart.