Joseph Gwilt

He was the son of George Gwilt, architect surveyor to the county of Surrey, and was born at Southwark.

[1] In recognition of Gwilt's advocacy of the importance to architects of a knowledge of mathematics, he was in 1833 elected a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.

[1] His principal works as a practical architect were Markree Castle near Sligo in Ireland, and St Thomas's Church (1849–1850) at Charlton[2] in Kent[1] (today part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich) and the tower of St Thomas, Clapton Common (1829).

[3] Gwilt was also associated (c. 1813–1830) with a flawed and short-lived attempt to rebuild the mediaeval predecessor of today's St Margaret's Church in Lee.

In his Encyclopaedia of Architecture, he informs us that standing stones predated all other forms of architecture, that the Druids were the world's first race of civilised people, and that at one time the language and alphabet of the entire ancient world from Ireland to India was the same - that of the Irish Druids.