James Mackenzie Roberts does not appear in Blower’s Architects, Surveyors, Engineers and Builders Directory of 1860, which lists London and provincial architects and surveyors, but we know from his correspondence during the Essex church restorations that from the mid-1850s into the early 1860s he also had a London address, at 52A Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square (north of Oxford Street), ‘one door from Great Portland Street’. It looks like a dairy occupied number 52, although Richard Voyce, a groom, was listed as lodger and sole resident at 52A in the 1861 census, so perhaps these were rooms on an upper floor? There is no mention of James here, who was listed at Heath Cottage on census night 1861. 

My great-great grandfather’s brother, the physician and surgeon William Pollard Roberts, also gave his address as 52A Mortimer Street from 1858 to 1867, but again, he was elsewhere in the 1861 census. Presumably though W.P. and James lodged here during the week: census night was a Sunday. 

For James the three-hour commute would have been made by train from Ardleigh or Manningtree to Bishopsgate station and then by horse-bus or carriage – or on foot. From 1874, a new terminus was opened at Liverpool Street, with a cavernous train shed designed by the Great Eastern Railways engineer, Edward Wilson (1820–77).

The Royal Courts of Justice

It is not clear what work James did after his restoration of Dedham church in 1862. One family story, according to brief notes left by his granddaughter Dorothy Roberts, is that he ‘designed part of the London Law Courts’. This would be the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. The principal architect of the courts was George Edmund Street (1824­–81), whose winning design led to his appointment in May 1868. (See an account of the competition here.) In his capacity as consulting surveyor for the Office of Works, Henry Arthur Hunt, under whom James had been a pupil, was largely concerned with the costing and selection of a site for, and the erection of, the courts (see p.81 here)– as well as many other public and government buildings in London. Hunt (knighted in 1876), ‘never afraid of challenging the architectural heavyweights of the day’, was critical of Street’s plans. 

It seems unlikely James actually designed any of the courts himself but it is certainly possible he worked under Hunt in some capacity. However, according to M.H. Port, he is not listed as a direct employee, nor can he be found among the Office of Works personnel in the British Imperial Calendar during this period. But there were innumerable draughtsmen, surveyors and clerks of works contributing to this vast project and over 1,200 plans and drawings exist, dated between 1871 and 1880, and I have not inspected them. 

Many individual names are probably lost to history. One on record is Lewis Karslake (1844–1912), who according to his DBA entry was in Hunt’s office for five years and for nine months assisted John Raphael Brandon (1817–77) of nearby Clements Inn on his proposed (and rejected) drawings for the law courts. 

Furnival’s Inn

My feeling is there must be some truth to the family story that James worked on the law courts in some capacity. But what evidence is there? 

The year The Builder announced Street’s winning bid (1868), James’s entry in Wyman’s Architects Engineers & Building Trades Directory reads:

Roberts, James Mackenzie. Heath Cottage, Dedham, Essex; and 15 Furnival’s Inn, London. Pupil of H.A. Hunt, esq. His works comprise resotration of Dedham and Peldon churches, Essex and various other works. 

Furnival’s Inn was a ten minute walk from the site chosen by Hunt and had a fascinating history. It stood on the north side of Holborn, between Brooke Street and the end of Leather Lane and was originally one of the Inns of Chancery, but converted into private apartments and offices by the builder Henry Peto in the 1820s (and demolished in 1897). 

Although many of the rooms were occupied by solicitors, it was also a popular address with architects and other professionals. Charles Dickens mentions it in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) as having ‘a good many stairs’ and in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844): 

There is little enough to see in Furnival’s Inn. It is a shady, quiet place, echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers who have business there, and rather monotonous and gloomy on summer evenings. 

The Inn consisted of sixteen blocks (including a hotel, Woods; and, in the 1860s, a law stationer’s shop). Each block extended to four floors and a basement. Before James was there, Dickens had leased rooms at the very same address, 15 Furnival’s Inn, moving there (from number 13) in February 1836 until the following spring. 

According to Dickens’s biographer, John Forster, the great novelist paid a return visit to the building in 1869 (I wonder if this was while James was still there?). With his companion, Dickens ‘mounted a staircase he had not ascended for more than thirty years, to show the chamber in Furnival’s Inn where the first page of Pickwick was written.’ 

Dickens lived on the third floor of number 15. A floorplan of the apartment and further information can be found here. Here is a plan of the Inn and an an illustration of number 15 (from Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings and Personality by Frederic G. Kitton).

We don’t know which floor James was on but we do know the names of others who passed through number 15. Throughout the 1860s, the mainstay at 15 Furnival’s Inn, presumably on the ground floor, was a porter, William Humphrey: possibly he was connected to Woods Hotel. 

There were also a few architects, according to the trade directories and the biannual Boyle’s Court Guide:

The Cambridge-born architect Frederick Peck (1828–75) had an office there between 1864 and 1871, when his residence was across Bloomsbury in Gordon Square. He was noted as the designer of the Royal Agricultural Halls in Islington and buildings at Upton, West Ham in 1869. 

Peck’s sometime partner Henry Edward Coe (1826–85) was also at 15 Furnival’s Inn for a couple of years in 1867–69. According to his obituary in The Builder Coe also worked on is own account in Lambeth and Plymouth, so may have been known to James.

Joel Foster Earle

The most interesting occupant though was Joel Foster Earle (1821–86), who in 1850 married the daughter of a solicitor with chambers at number 15. Earle had trained as a Baptist minister but by 1860 was working as an architect at Furnival’s Inn, first at number 3 (according to Blower’s 1860 directory) and then until 1870 at number 15 (Boyle’s Court Guide and the Post Office Directory). Like James, his family home was out of town, at New Barnet, although he was originally from Hull.

Earle was certainly known to James. According to The Builder (17 December 1864), Earle had drawn up plans for a house in St John’s Wood, London for which James organised the specifications and put the work out for tender:

For residence in the Avenue-road, St John’s Wood, for Mr J.N. Palmer. Mr J.F. Earle, architect. Quantities supplied by Mr. J.M. Roberts.

The lowest bid (of £2,655) was accepted. 

Avenue Road, leading from Regent’s Park up to Swiss Cottage, was already lined with large villas by the 1860s. It is not known which house James was supplying the quantites for but the client, J.N. Palmer, was almost certainly Joseph Nottingham Palmer (1816–74), a fruit merchant of nearby Hamilton Terrace, Maida Vale. But as far as I can see, no one of this name lived in Avenue Road, St John’s Wood in the 1860s (although Palmer’s offices were in another avenue, East India Avenue, Leadenhall). Maybe the residence was designed for a family member – or maybe it was never built?

Either way, given this project and their shared address of 15 Furnival’s Inn, my great-great grandfather clearly had some sort of working relationship with Joel Foster Earle in the 1860s, albeit probably brief, as a quantity surveyor. I have found no other instance of their names mentioned together, but Earle was associated with other London projects around this time, such as the London, Birmingham and South Staffordshire Bank, Cheapside (The Builder, 1863), so perhaps James was involved in those too?

By the 1870s, the social tenor of this neighbourhood was changing: the clerks and engineers making way for labourers and artisans. Indeed, Charles Booth, in his monumental survey into London life and labour (carried out between 1886 and 1903), described it as follows:

Olney St is a continuation of Lorrimore St and used to be better than it[;] but now, since the rebuilding of Lorrimore St, it is decidedly poorer. 

Booth coloured it pink on his map, denoting it as ‘fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.’

The south London James would have known was bustling with small factories, workshops and trades of all kind and was populated by lower-middle- and working-class lodgers and families who had often migrated from other inner city shambles to squeeze into its bricks and mortar. 

James’s addresses in the 1870s and 1880s were unusual for a professional architect or surveyor of the day, who may well have lived in Walworth in 1860 but would be expected to reside at the more affluent Norwood or Sydenham by 1880. 

This, plus the absence of his name from the primary professional journals of the day – The Builder, Building News, The Architect – leads me to believe he was primarily an employee rather than working on his own account. 

If an architect or surveyor were involved in a local estate, he might appear in title-deeds or in other records of such estates. But there is no mention of James anywhere. It is more likely his work continued to take him into central London, quite possibly as an employee of the Office of Works (which administered the construction of large public buildings), or even the Metropolitan Board of Works (which assumed responsibility for urban improvements such as streets and sewerage).

Dedham no doubt seemed a rural idyll by comparison with London’s noisy streets and crowded thoroughfares. When the 1881 census was taken, on the night of Tuesday 3 April, only two of my great-great grandfather’s children were left to look after the family home at Heath Cottage. As it was a weekday, James was in London, at 44 Penton Place, Newington, a few paces from his previous lodgings at Olney Street. He is described as an ‘architect’s surveyor’, but there is no indication if he was employed or working on his own account.

Surrounded by a typically cosmopolitan mix of neighbours – an oilman, a slater, an Italian artist, a paper agent, an omnibus conductor, a church organist, and few born locally – number 44 was the home of the Searby family: Benjamin, a grocer, Sophia, his wife, and their five children. Also lodging at the large and no doubt bustling house were two clerks (one unemployed), an upholsterer, a cheesemonger’s dealer and a Scottish civil engineer called William Gow. As Charles Booth succinctly put it in his survey taken in the summer of 1899, Penton Place was home to ‘mechanics, labourers, printers’ clerks; none really poor’.