Architect born in Dereham, Norfolk, the second of five surviving sons of a wealthy builder. He attended Norwich School of Art and Design before serving a three-year apprenticeship in London under John Lee, FRIBA, initially in Regent Street. On completion in 1879 he joined his father in Dereham before establishing his practice in Norwich. He won a prize at the age of 23 to build a hospital in Somerset, and was commissioned to build houses in a vernacular style in Doulting, near Shepton Mallett, before receiving the patronage of William Clark, the shoe manufacturer, who was based in Street and for whom he built a home (now Millfield School), a town hall, several terraces in stone, and a clock tower. Back in Norfolk, Skipper designed hotels in Cromer, Lowestoft, and Great Yarmouth in the 1890s, all utilising brick decorated with ‘Cosseyware’, terracotta details by Messrs Gunton of Costessey. Some items came from the hand of the sculptor and woodcarver, James Minns. On Skipper’s office front (1896) in London Street, Norwich, Minns made a sequence of terracotta panels which included representations of the architect himself. The wide central panels were carved in a less-skilled manner by Skipper’s office staff of clerks and surveyors.
Around the turn of the twentieth century Skipper won important commissions in Norwich, and used faience tiles from Royal Doulton – in collaboration with the artist-ceramicist William Neatby – to decorate Norwich’s flamboyant Royal Arcade (1899). Glazed tiles were also used to clad the extraordinary No.7 St Giles Street building (1899–1900) and those at 11 Haymarket (1901–02) and 11 Red Lion Street (1903), this last replete with Edwardian putti attributed to the sculptor, Henry Charles Fehr. Away from Norwich, Skipper designed the Arts and Crafts influenced Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club at Lowestoft, Suffolk (1902–03), as well as huge maltings inland at Oulton Broad (1900–02). Skipper’s most prestigious work was the Norwich Union Insurance offices (1903–04; Historic England Listed Grade I), a stone-clad mansion-office of fine proportions, with a richly coloured marble interior, the result of a collaboration with William Brindley, surviving partner of architectural masons, Farmer & Brindley. Among notable works by Skipper was the restoration (1905–08) of Sennowe Hall near Fakenham, which brought all Skipper’s visions of towers, pavilions, stone urns and statuary together, employing his team of artisans, including Italian marble workers under Brindley. The First World War brought an end to grand commissions. Skipper turned to the design of council houses, and a village to house Welsh miners in the new collieries in Kent. Twice-widowed before the war, in 1913 he married Alice Roberts, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Skipper was commissioned to redesign Sackville Street in London’s Mayfair, and he opened an office there when work began in the 1930s. The project later faltered, and before the Second World War, Skipper returned to Norwich where he was to witness the Baedeker raids over the old city in April 1942. Miraculously, his buildings survived.
Bibliography: R. Barnes, George Skipper – The Architect’s Life and Works, Norwich, 2020; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. x, 8, 28–30, 34–35, 35–37, 50, 55–56, 58–60, 226; Historic England: Norwich Union Offices (official list entry); A.C. Howe, ‘Skipper, George John (1856–1948)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn.), 2011; D. Summers, ‘George John Skipper: Norfolk Architect’, in K. Ferry, Powerhouses of Provincial Architecture, 1837–1914, London, 2009.
Richard Barnes, September 2025