Sir Herbert Baker

Herbert Baker was a prominent British architect who was especially active between the 1890s and late 1930s. He spent much of his early career in South Africa, where he came under the influence of the leading South African politician and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes. Baker established his reputation during this early period designing houses for the colonial patrician classes in Cape Town and Johannesburg, as well as several key civic buildings, including the Union Buildings in Pretoria (1910–1913), the seat of the newly united Dominion of South Africa government. He would go on to assist Edwin Lutyens in planning and designing key administrative buildings in the imperial capital of New Delhi in British India. Of these his two most significant were the Secretariat Buildings (1912–1927), flanking King’s Way in front of Lutyens’s majestic Viceroy’s House. In Britain Baker is noted for having designed the high commission buildings of India House (1928–1930) and South Africa House (1930–1933), both in London, as well as for the unenviable task of rebuilding the Bank of England (1921–1942), for which he was later much criticized, somewhat unfairly. His relationship to Cecil Rhodes also saw him receive the commission to design Rhodes House, Oxford (1929), the base for Rhodes’s now famous Oxford scholarship scheme. Baker is of interest as an architect as much for his intellectual musings on the nature of architecture as for his buildings. He wrote and lectured on architecture a great deal throughout his career, leaving behind a rich corpus of handwritten, typed, and published manuscripts. This body of work betrays not only his passion for the architecture of Christopher Wren, but also his commitment to the British empire and ideas concerning the merits of imperialism more generally. In this regard Baker was one of the most ideologically driven architects operating during the “high noon” of the British empire, capturing in his words and buildings the cultural, racial, and political sentiments of empire more than any other British architect, before or since. His output therefore provides a near unparalleled window onto the relationship between architecture and empire in the history of British architecture. Most of the works listed below touch on this legacy in one form or another. The following bibliography is not exhaustive but covers most of the major works by and on the architect. Smaller journalistic pieces in newspapers and magazines, of which there are many, are largely omitted.