Architect, born in Poughill, Cornwall. At the time of his marriage to Emma Deacon of Liskeard in 1876 he was described as a builder and contractor. By 1881 Treleaven and his wife had moved to south London and, after being articled successively to J. Keates, Mark King and Arthur Cawston, in 1887 Treleaven began practising as an architect. He relocated to Beeston, Nottinghamshire, and in 1900 was appointed in-house architect to Boots the Chemist, whose head office was in Nottingham. Treleaven was responsible for designing the company’s mock-Tudor-fronted shops during the decade up to the outbreak of the First World War. The earliest, planned in 1903, was at King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Many of those that followed included figures in niches representing historical figures of local significance. Examples include Winchester (1905; bishops Aethelwold, Walkelin, Wykeham and Fox); Kingston upon Thames (1909; Queen Elizabeth I and kings Edward the Elder, Athelstan, Henry III, Edward III and John); Bury St Edmunds (1910; Agricola, St Edmund and kings Edward I and Edward VI with, in the gable, a relief entitled ‘Canute Rebuking his Flatterers’); and Peterborough (1911; Bishop Aethelwold, Penda of Mercia, King Henry VIII, Prince Rupert and the Earl of Essex). For Edinburgh and Newcastle upon Tyne, where exposed timber frames would have looked out of place, Treleaven designed stone frontages. Edinburgh’s frontage (building completed c.1911; demolished 1965) was decorated with figures of Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, John Knox, George Wishart, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, and its gable, a narrative relief depicting Bonnie Prince Charlie leading his Jacobite followers into battle, while Newcastle’s frontage (building completed c.1912) had figures of Thomas Bewick, Harry Hotspur, Sir John Marley and Roger Thornton. Gilbert Seale is known to have produced the figures on the Kingston, Bury St Edmunds and Peterborough frontages and may well have been responsible for some or perhaps all of the others. Treleaven left Boots shortly after completing the Newcastle building and by 1923 had returned to Cornwall and established an office in Bude. In 1925 he was admitted as a Licentiate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (LRIBA). By 1930 he was in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, and in 1934, at the time of his death, he was in Windsor, Berkshire.
Bibliography: AHRnet: Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects 1850–1900; Building our Past: (i) A Spotter’s Guide to Boots the Chemist (27 February 2017); (ii) Boots’ Architects. 2. Michael Vyne Treleaven (8 April 2017); R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 200–01; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, p. 156; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 2, pp. 475–77; P. Usherwood et al, Public Sculpture of North-East England, Liverpool, 2000, pp. 126–27.
Terry Cavanagh, May 2025