Designed by Mary Watts, wife of the renowned artist George Frederick Watts; a popular English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement of the late 19th Century, Watts Chapel sits in the village of Compton, near Guilford, Surrey.
It is constructed of local bricks and roof tiles and clad in highly decorated terracotta blocks, Watts Chapel embodies the English 19th Century Arts and Crafts movement and is now an important internationally known building.
Unfortunately the ravages of the British climate had not been kind to it.
Our Senior Architect, Nigel Hammett RIBA SCA took the lead for a major programme of conservation and restoration works which restored the building to its original splendour and resulted in the work receiving several conservation awards.
Nigel continues to have close interest in the building and in 2012 used his intimate knowledge of the building to contribute to the reprint of Mary Watts 1905 book ‘The Word in the Pattern’ in a chapter entitled ‘Investigation of the Structure and the Repair of the Fabric’.
