Architect and merchant, baptised in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, on 8 July 1647, the son of a mercer, also Henry Bell, who was twice mayor of King’s Lynn. After attending the local grammar school, the younger Henry Bell was admitted to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA degree in 1665. He then went on a grand tour of Europe, developing his taste for paintings, which he collected, and architecture, which he would go on to practise in his spare time in a style influenced by Dutch architecture and Christopher Wren. In 1678 he married Anne Brumble (the couple would have five sons and one daughter) and in 1686, following the death of his father, continued the family business producing linseed and rape seed oil. He became an alderman in 1690 and, like his father, served as mayor of King’s Lynn twice, in 1692 and 1703.
His first major involvement in architecture and planning was in the rebuilding of Northampton after the devastating fire of September 1675. The two buildings generally attributed to him, both of them in collaboration with the London surveyor, Edward Edwards, are the Sessions House (1676–78) and All Saints Church (1676–80). His most important building, however, is the Customs House in King’s Lynn (1683), which has been grade I listed because of its architectural interest as ‘an exquisitely proportioned building with elevations of outstanding architectural refinement’. Pevsner hailed it as ‘one of the finest late c17 public buildings in provincial England’. Bell’s other major building in west Norfolk is All Saints Church, North Runcton (1703–13).
Bibliography: B. Bailey et al, Northamptonshire (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2013, passim; J. Bold, ‘Bell, Henry (bap. 1647, d. 1711)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn), (2004), 2008; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. x, 122–23; Historic England: Customs House … King’s Lynn … Official List Entry; N. Pevsner and B. Wilson, Norfolk 2: North-West and South (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 1997, passim.
Terry Cavanagh, April 2025