Architect and surveyor of Southport, Lancashire. He was responsible, according to the Annals of Southport, for ‘nearly all the buildings’ in the newly developing town during the late 1840s and early 1850s. He designed the Hoghton Street Chapel (1847); the Market (1848); the Promenade Hospital (1852–53; originally the Southport Convalescent Hospital and Sea Bathing Infirmary); the Town Hall, with its tympanum figures of Justice, Mercy and Truth by a Mr Gibbs, a sculptor probably from the Wigan-based firm of Gibbs and Holt (1852–53); and the Royal Clifton Hotel (1853–54). Withnell’s wife, Sarah, died of dropsy on 3 October 1858, and Withnell himself died on 3 March 1860. Their son, William Edwin Withnell (1842–1909) was also an architect.
Ancestry website sources: 1851 England census, Lancashire, North Meols; 1860, Lancashire, Church of England Deaths and Burials … Parish Registers, Southport, Christ Church
Bibliography: F.A. Bailey, A History of Southport, Southport, 1955, p. 135; E. Bland, Annals of Southport and District …, Southport, 1903, pp. 130, 133, 139, 140, 142, 154; C. Hartwell and N. Pevsner, Lancashire North (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2009; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. xvii, 206; Southport BMDs 1858; Southport street and trade directories.
Terry Cavanagh, November 2025