Architect. Born at Greenwich, son of a cabinetmaker (later a surveyor) of Huguenot origin, he attended the Royal Academy Schools, and was then articled to the architects George Legg and George Porter. He started his own practice in London in 1838, but in 1841–42 travelled extensively in Europe with architectural colleagues, including Ewan Christian and Horace Jones. Teulon has been described as the chief of the so-called ‘rogue’ neo-gothic architects of the Victorian period, indicating that they took an individualistic and colourful rather than a strict or doctrinaire approach to the gothic style. Declining to enter competitions for public buildings, Teulon established useful contacts with wealthy and landed people, which brought commissions for country houses. These included Shadwell, Norfolk (1856–60), for Lady Buxton, and Elvetham Hall, Hampshire (1859–62), for Lord Calthorpe. Amongst the many churches, in which Teulon employed the patterned brickwork and polychromy more often associated with William Butterfield, his masterpiece is St Stephen’s, Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead (1869–75), completed after his death by Ewan Christian. Teulon also provided the architectural expertise for the Buxton Memorial Drinking Fountain, funded and designed by Charles Buxton, M.P., in commemoration of the emancipation of slavery within the British dominions in 1834 and in memory of his father, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, and his father’s fellow abolitionists; the fountain was erected in Parliament Square in 1833, but removed in 1949 and re-erected in Victoria Tower Gardens in 1957.
Bibliography: Illustrated London News, 10 March 1866, p. 241 (engr. of ‘Buxton Memorial Drinking Fountain’), p. 242 (text); J.M. Richards (rev. M.J. Saunders), ‘Teulon, Samuel Sanders (1812–1873)’, ODNB (online edn), (2004), 2005; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 188, 375–77.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, January 2025