Designer and amateur architect born in Manchester, most of whose buildings are in Knutsford, Cheshire. In 1864 he went to Australia and worked in a Brisbane surveyor’s office. He returned to Britain in 1867, and in 1868 acquired qualifications to teach drawing. He did not, however, pursue this career and became the proprietor of a Manchester glove firm, Richard Watt & Company. He travelled extensively in Europe – especially Italy – and the Middle East, sketching architecture wherever he stayed. He lived at Bowdon in Cheshire and there met the architect, John Brooke. In 1895 he moved to nearby Knutsford, where Brooke designed a house for him, The Croft, on Legh Road. In 1898 Watt built an extravagant and fantastic laundry with houses for the workers on Knutsford’s Drury Lane. His architect was H.S. Fairhurst, whom he took to Italy for a month in that year to enable him to sketch the towers and other details required for the laundry. In 1901, Walter Aston replaced Fairhurst and by about 1904 W.H. Longworth had taken over from Aston as Watt’s architect. Watt also took Longworth to Italy for initiation into his preferred style. Watt employed each of these architects in the construction of a series of large and visionary houses along Legh Road. It seems that gradually Watt became his own architect, relying on the architects he employed only to provide drawings based on his designs and to supervise the building work. Watt’s last substantial buildings were the Elizabeth Gaskell Memorial Tower and King’s Coffee House (1904–07) in the centre of Knutsford. His style seems to have depended on his own drawings of a wide range of picturesque historic buildings, especially in Italy, Spain and the Middle East, although there are similarities with the contemporary Glasgow and Barcelona schools. His approach to architecture was in part sculptural, as he relied extensively on clay models to convey his ideas to his architects. He had a strong social conscience, demanding and providing good housing and recreational facilities for the poorer inhabitants of Knutsford.
Bibliography (updated 2025): A.S. Gray, Edwardian Architecture: A Biographical Dictionary, London, 1985, pp. 372–74; C. Hartwell et al, Cheshire (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, (2011), 2024, pp. 57, 65, 420, 423–28, 524, pls. 104, 105; M. Hyde, A Window on Knutsford, Hale, 2000, pp. 117–40; J. Leach, ‘What’s Watt in Knutsford’, Cheshire Life, November 1984, pp. 46–47; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 122–24; M. Sykes and C. Neve, ‘A Laundry from Damascus: R.H. Watt in Knutsford’, Country Life, 4 March 1976, pp. 526–29; A. and W. Tatton Brown, ‘An Unprofessional Genius’, Architectural Review, October 1940, pp. 109–12.
Emma Roberts, 2012