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DOUGLAS RICHARDSON The Maw Tiles from Sherborne Villa ... Colour is the grand essential of architecture ... Sir George Gilbert Scott With their vivid colours, smooth texture, and hard surface, Victorian floor tiles are an appealing and significant hybrid representing the union of art and industry, of neD-medieval taste and modern technology, of natural resources and chemical experiments. Such tiles produced by Maw and Company in the Ironbridge Gorge of Shropshire in the 18505 were immediately introduced into architectural practice in Canada at several Toronto sites. They document the rapid acceptance of ideas and the transmission of products fostered by the industrial revolution - from extraction, through production, to transportation, all powered by steam.1 Tile furnished by Maw and Company to pave one of these buildings, the long-demolished Sherborne Villa, is the focus of discussion here. The floor of the foyer, University of Toronto Art Centre, 1996 Photograph by John Glover 1 For an overview of tiles of different types in Toronto buildings - especially for fireplace surrounds and for washstands, but also for paving floors - see Lochnan. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1997 468 DOUGLAS RICHARDSON Sherborne Villa, 439 Sherbourne Street, Toronto, (1856) 1857-58/9, by Cumberland and Storm, demolished c 1962/3 The Maw tile as originally installed in the hall of Sherborne Villa, partially obscured by rugs Photographs courtesy of Sheldon Godfrey Cumberland and Storm, Toronto's leading architects, called for tenders on 'a BRICK DWELLING HOUSE, to be erected on Sherborne street, near Carlton street,' in the autumn of 1856, just a fortnight after commencing the construction of their largest and most important undertaking, University College.2 Thomas Gibbs Ridout (1792-1861), Cashier of the Bank of Upper Canada, commissioned the design from his brother-in-law· Frederic Cumberland. The house would be known as Sherborne Villa, from the Ridout family's home at Sherborne in Dorset, England.3 The architects' drawings for Sherborne Villa have outlived it.4 They show a house that was 2 The tender call for Sherborne Villa (dated 18 October) appears in theToronto Globe, Friday, 24 October 1856, 3, call (reference courtesy of Stephen A. Otto, Geoffrey Simmins). The foundation stone of the college had been laid on 40dober 1856, after wha t appears to have been a last-minute scramble to complete the drawings required to begin the work: see Richardson et aI, 69. 3 Arthur, 290. The proposed house, eventually bearing the municipal designation 439 Sherbourne Street, gave its name, in turn, to the street (with a later change in spelling). 4 TheJ.CB. and Eric Horwood Collection lists twenty-two sheets of draWings for the house: cll-664-0 -1 (633) K-94· THE MAW TILES -FROM SHERBORNE VILLA 469 'one of the largest in the city' and 'built of white brick in the Italian villa style,' as the Globe reported when it was nearing completion.5 Sherborne Villa rose with astonishing rapidity. Thomas Ridout's letters to his wife, Matilda, document the progress of the work.6 The excavation was begun on 25 April 1857. By 10 May there were already seventy men at work on the site. The roof had been completed and the chimneys built by 26 July. -The Colonist called it a 'mansion,' on rising ground with 'a magnificent prospect towards the lake,' and thought it 'one of the most substantial seats in the vicinity of Toronto.t7 For a prosperous client the architects produced a house with a high finish and fine detail in keeping with its grand proportions and advanced design. Thomas Storm - a well-known builder and the father of Cumberland 's rartner, William Storm - ,contracted on8 November 1856 to build the house. The best materials were used. The white brick must have come from the brickyards in nearby Yorkville and was undoubtedly from the Toronto Patent Pressed Brick Company, which was owned by Fred Cumberland in partnership with the contractor John Worthington, while the cut-stone dressings were from Ohio and presumably from the important quarries that Worthington had developed in Cleveland.9 This combination of brick and stone in a matching greige colour was one the architects favoured in almost all their important works (including...

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