T.E. Collcutt (1840-1924)

Thomas Edward Collcutt was born in Oxford on 16 March 1840, and was articled to Richard Armstrong, an Edinburgh-born London-based architect who had been an assistant with Edward Blore. At the end of his articles he became an assistant first to Mills & Murgatroyd and then to George Edmund Street, subsequently spending some time with the cabinetmakers Collinson & Locke which gave him experience in high-quality woodwork. In 1867 he moved to Brighton as assistant to its borough surveyor working on the conversion of the Pavilion stables riding school into assembly rooms.

Collcutt commenced independent practice in London in 1869, one of his earliest private clients being his former employers Collinson & Locke whose Fleet Street premises he designed in 1873-4. In 1872, when briefly in partnership as Woodzell & Collcutt, he won his first competition, the Public Library and Museum at Blackburn, Lancashire. In 1877 he won the competition for the Town Hall at Wakefield with a Gothic design in deference to the assessor, his former master G.E. Street.