page_title: Amon Henry Wilds
section_title: Works
hierarchical_section_title: Amon Henry Wilds / Works
caption_attribution_description: English: The Victoria Fountain in Victoria Gardens by Amon Henry Wilds, The Old Steine, Brighton, East Sussex, Brighton
context_page_description: Amon Henry Wilds was an English architect. He was part of a team of three architects and builders who—working together or independently at different times—were almost solely responsible for a surge in residential construction and development in early 19th-century Brighton, which until then had been a small but increasingly fashionable seaside resort on the East Sussex coast. In the 1820s, when Wilds, his father Amon Wilds and Charles Busby were at their most active, nearly 4,000 new houses were built, along with many hotels, churches and venues for socialising; most of these still survive, giving Brighton a distinctive Regency-era character, and many are listed buildings.
context_section_description: Brighton Unitarian Church, a Grade II*-listed building, was built early in Wilds junior's architectural career.  He designed the 350-capacity building with guidance from its first minister, Dr Morell. It was intended to resemble the Temple of Thesæus in Athens, and has an enormous tetrastyle portico of four Doric columns beneath a pediment.
  Six years later, a merchant named Charles Elliott acquired the right to build a proprietary chapel on land belonging to the 3rd Earl of Egremont east of Brighton; Wilds junior created another Classical-style design for the new St Mary the Virgin Church.  It was based on the Temple of Nemesis. By 1876, its structural condition was so poor that it collapsed, and it was rebuilt in red-brick Gothic style.
  Oriental Place and Sillwood Place are the remaining parts of an ambitious scheme for which Wilds junior was hired in 1825 by a horticulturalist and landscape gardener, Henry Phillips, who had designed Kemp Town's enclosed gardens.  He proposed an Oriental-style garden with a tall, steam-heated glasshouse called the Athenaeum, a library, museum and school, all surrounded by high-class houses. Wilds junior started building two north-south terraces accordingly, but Phillips' money ran out and he abandoned the project.  A local magistrate bought the land in 1827 and asked Wilds junior to finish the work.  Sillwood Place was built on the proposed Athenaeum site. Ammonite capitals feature prominently on Oriental Place, which is listed at Grade II*.
  Wilds junior also built Hanover Crescent, to the northeast of Brighton off the Lewes Road, on behalf of a speculator—this time, local entrepreneur Henry Brooker.  He felt that property speculation would be profitable even in areas further away from the town centre, such was Brighton's growing popularity in the Regency era, so he bought a set of strips of farmland in 1814 and commissioned Wilds junior to build a crescent-shaped façade and the shells of houses; buyers could then add internal fittings as they wished.  They were built in around 1822 and are listed at Grade II.
  Between 1822 and 1825, Wilds and Busby designed and built Gothic House on Western Road at the top of Western Terrace.  Regency Gothic in style, it represents the only occasion they attempted the Gothic Revival style. It is a Grade II-listed building. On the other side of Western Terrace, the Western Pavilion was built in an elaborate Oriental and Indian style in imitation of the Royal Pavilion in 1828, and is now a Grade II* listed building.  Amon Henry Wilds built it as his own house.  He also lived at Gothic House and the central house in Western Terrace (now No.6).
  Following the success of his work in Brighton, Wilds was commissioned to design a new crescent for the growing seaside town of Worthing, 11 miles west along the coast.  Originally to be called Royal Park Crescent, it became known simply as Park Crescent.  Wilds also designed a triumphal arch and Swiss Cottages for the site.
  On Montpelier Road in the Montpelier area of Brighton, he built numbers 53 to 56—a three-storey terrace of four houses designed as two identical pairs—in about 1830.  The entrances are between Doric pilasters, and there are ammonite capitals at second-floor level.  There are small cast-iron balconies outside the first-floor windows. The group has been listed at Grade II.
  Nearby Montpelier Crescent was Wilds junior's largest-scale independent work. Built between 1843 and 1847 in the Seven Dials area, whose development had been stimulated by the recent opening of the nearby railway station, it was laid out as a curving terrace of mansions, each divided into two dwellings.  Some had pilasters decorated with ammonite capitals. The section of the crescent now numbered 7–31 is listed at Grade II*; the other houses are of a different design and are newer: they date from around 1855 and are listed at Grade II in four separate parts.
  In 1820 or 1826, Wilds (possibly in conjunction with Busby) rebuilt a terraced house on Castle Square to form the Royal Pavilion Tavern.  He refronted it in the Regency style 
caption: Victoria Fountain, Old Steine
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