J W Poundley and D Walker

John Wilkes Poundley (1807–1872)

Baptized at Montgomery, 27 April 1807. Following the death of his father, he was taken into the guardianship of William Pugh of Caerhowel and in 1827 he was apprenticed to the Oswestry architect Thomas Penson. He never qualified as an architect. In 1857 Poundley published Poundley’s Cottage Architecture. Poundley had close connections with Naylor family who, in 1835, had acquired the Brynllywarch estates at Kerry from William Pugh, the son of his guardian. They were also to acquire other estates at Leighton and Nantcribba. Poundley was employed to undertake survey work of these acquisitions. These surveys are now bound in two handsome atlas volumes in the National Library of Wales. The Leighton Estate was purchased in 1847 and Poundley was employed on the construction of the monumental model farm from about 1849 to 1860. Apart from the farm itself, some of the more important structures are the Poultry House and the ‘cottage orneé’ Poultry Cottage, the Cable House of the Railway and the massive stone built slurry tank, for the effluent from the farm.

About 1850 Poundley moved from Brook Cottage in Kerry to Black Hall. In the 1860‘s until the partnership was David Walker was dissolved, their output was prodigious and included considerable quantities of estate housing. Their work extended to David Davies' Llandinam estate, the Abbeycwmhir estate in Radnorshire and model farms for the Earl of Cawdor in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. It is difficult to judge to what extent Poundley actually designed buildings, but the decorative bargeboards on cottage orneé buildings as at Glanmule seems to represent his work, as well as the use of red brick with rusticated stone quoining. Poundley was the main promoter of the Abermule to Kerry Railway, which had been authorized as part of the Oswestry and Newtown Railway Act of 1855. This came into effect in May 1861 following the opening of Abermule Station. The construction of the railway and the building of Kerry Station at Glanmule appears to have been supervised by Poundley, opening on 2 May 1864. The railway amalgamated with others to form the Cambrian Railways in July 1864. Poundley was also a sheep farmer and it was largely through his efforts the Kerry Sheep breed came to be recognized

Poundley’s Cottage Architecture 1857

This was produced for a group of Denbighshire Gentlemen under the sponsorship of Lord Bagot, of Pool Park near Denbigh and of Blithfield in Staffordshire. The double cottage design produced by Poundley is very plain and lacks the decorative features seen on his work for the Naylor's Montgomeryshire estates. Poundley states that he had built 25 of these cottages in the past year and the cost would have been £250 for a double cottage. The plans for the farm buildings for a 200-acre farm are similar to the farm buildings he erected for the Naylors at Leighton and Kerry, but on a smaller scale.The farm buildings would have cost £1000. For a farm of 100 acres the cost would have been £790. He also published plans for a simple double cottage of Bungalow form which would have cost £180 and the walls of which were supported on an iron framing.

David Walker (1840–1892)

David Walker was a pupil of the architects William Hardy Hay and James Murdoch Hay in Liverpool. He was born in Birkenhead. He was practising at Unity Buildings Lord Street Liverpool in 1868 and had moved to Dale Street, Liverpool in 1881. He was still practising in 1890 and possibly up to his death, if he re-fronted the Bear Inn in Newtown in 1892. He particularly favoured whitish/yellow brick for his work and favoured rounded arched braced gables drawn from the writings of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc In later life Walker appears to have specialised in Church architecture and developed an interest an interest in church wood, writing articles on church screens and rood lofts. He restored the screen at Llanwnnog in Montgomeryshire in 1873 and re-built in 1877-8 the church at Llananno in Radnorshire, to house the medieval screen.

T G Newnham (1809/10–1898)

Thomas Garrett Newnham was the engineer to the Western Branch of the Montgomeryshire Canal in the 1830s and was a close associate of William Pugh, of Brynllywarch. In 1834 he was admitted as a member of the Institute of Civil Engineers and in 1836 he subscribed to Augustus Pugin’s Examples of Gothic Architecture, where he is described as an ‘Architect’ and his address is given as Newtown. He was involved in promoting an alternative route, on behalf of the now bankrupt William Pugh for the London to Holyhead Railway, in competition with Brunel and Stephenson. His model of Dolfor church was exhibited at The Great Exhibition of 1851. At about this time he left for India to become Chief Resident Engineer of the Sindh Railway and was responsible for St Andrew's Church, Karachi, which was completed in 1867. Later in the 1870‘s Newnham became deputy agent of Indus Flotilla, a steamship company

Public Buildings

Schools

Houses

Churches

Leighton Hall Estate

Nantcribba Estate

Brynllywarch Estate, Kerry

Extensive estate housing with typical red brick and stone rusticated quoining. An unusual composition by Poundley and Walker was a terrace of houses built for Naylor next to the former Kerry workhouse. The red bricks are punctuated by a double string of white brick and a pattern of white and black bricks below the eaves and for the upper voussoirs. The use of curved bricks in the voussiors give the impression of a pharonic head-dress.

Other work in Kerry

Earl of Cawdor’s Cardigan and Pembroke Estates: Model Farms

Bridges

Railways and Roads

As County Surveyor, Poundley is likely to have been involved in various road building improvement schemes and he ‘engineered the new road from the Pentre in Kerry to the Anchor.

Works by David Walker

Works which were completely after the dissolution of the partnership with Poundley in 1867.

Public Buildings

School

Churches

Works by T G Newnham

Literature