Samuel Daukes

From 1839 to 1842 Daukes was architect to the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, designing clerks' houses, engine sheds, brakesmen's cottages and, in 1840, Lansdown station in Cheltenham.

On starting the London office, a move probably prompted by his growing reputation and more specifically by winning the competition to design the 2nd Middlesex County Asylum which became known as the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, the Gloucester practice took into partnership James Medland (1808–94), who had been a fellow pupil of Daukes in Pritchett's office in York, and changed its name to Hamilton & Medland.

His family's good financial standing no doubt also enabled him to purchase the Park estate in Cheltenham in 1839, and to develop it in the tradition of speculators such as Pearson Thompson and Joseph Pitt.

He was able to use these styles and also the Italianate of Abberley Hall, Witley Court and Colney Hatch, with considerable originality and dash, and he comes across as an architect full of self-confidence, with a secure command of the Picturesque elements of a composition.

He failed, however, to adapt to the changing stylistic climate of the High Victorian period, and in the 1860s his practice seems to have declined, although he was still building churches in the Midlands.