Richard Herbert Carpenter (July 1841 – 18 April 1893) was an English Gothic Revival architect.
Carpenter was born 1841 in St Pancras, England, the son of the tractarian architect Richard Cromwell Carpenter and his wife Amelia. He is best known for his collaboration with Benjamin Ingelow; their architectural practice, founded by Carpenter's father and based in Marylebone, London, was responsible for the construction or of many ecclesiastical properties.
Biography
Carpenter attended Charterhouse School and began his architectural career working with his late father's partner William Slater.
Carpenter worked as architect to Ardingly College following the school's purchase of a site at Ardingly in 1862. He was taken into partnership with Slater in 1863 and was admitted ARIBA on 15 June of that year, his proposers being Slater, Mair and the St Pancras surveyor Henry Baker. In partnership with William Slater he designed the Gothic buildings of Denstone College (1868–73) The school buildings, hall, chapel and war memorial are all listed Grade II. The school's chapel was added in 1879–87 by Carpenter and Ingelow in a late 13th-century Gothic style; it consists of a four bay nave with polygonal apse.
Also in 1868, Carpenter started work on the ambitious Gothic chapel – with an internal height of – at Lancing College in Sussex. Work continued long after Carpenter's death; the projected tower was never built; plans to complete the west end have since been resurrected and as at 2013 were at the fundraising stage. Designs for the existing school buildings had been begun by his father in 1848, although construction did not begin until 1854.
In 1872 Carpenter was responsible for the design of the pulpit at Jesus Church, Forty Hill, Enfield, Middlesex. This led to a commission in 1874 for a complete church at Enfield, St Michael and All Angels. built in ragstone in a fourteenth-century Gothic style, with a clerestory with double lancet windows. The altar in the chancel is recessed into polygonal vaulted apse in the Byzantine style with stone reredos depicting the Crucifixion. Carpenter's plans could not be carried out completely, due to lack of funds.