Joseph Sunlight

Joseph Sunlight (2 January 1889 [O.S. 20 December 1888] – 15 April 1978), was a Belarusian/ English architect whose energy amassed him a great fortune in Manchester and left at least one fine building in Sunlight House.

Joseph Sunlight

Sunlight House, Manchester

Biography

Born Novogrudok, Belarus, then part of Russia, his Jewish family were named Schimschlavitch, his father a cotton merchant. In later life, Sunlight enjoyed to "dine out" on tales of his family's adventures and brushes with the Tsarist authorities but it is suspected that these were largely fanciful. The family emigrated to England in 1890 to avoid conscription and settled in Manchester, probably choosing their new name from Port Sunlight.

Sunlight was apprenticed to an architect in Manchester in 1904 and by 1907 had his own practice in St Ann's Square. Reputedly, by 1910, he had designed and built more than 1000 houses in Prestwich and claimed that by 1921 he had created more than one million pounds' worth of property.

He also designed and built factories and warehouses, but his greatest memorial is Sunlight House (1932). In 1949, he proposed a 40-storey extension, but it was rejected by the city council. His sole religious building was the technically innovative South Manchester Synagogue (1913).

Sunlight was elected Liberal Member of Parliament for Shrewsbury in the 1923 general election and introduced a Private Member's Bill on the standardisation of bricks. Though the bill survived by a single vote, it was lost when Sunlight was defeated in the 1924 United Kingdom general election.

Sunlight, though always professing his affection for the faith of his parents, seems to have been more interested in his favourite pastime of horse racing.

Family

He married Edith Forshaw in 1940, and they had one son, artist Ben Sunlight.

Bibliography

Kadish, S. "Sunlight, Joseph (1889-1978)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/42156, accessed 5 June 2005> (subscription required)
Obituary, Manchester Evening News, 18 April 1978

gollark: In a saner world retailers would probably just increase pricing.

gollark: .

gollark: You can either have a shortage with some random subset of very fast people able to buy them, or have scalpers at least make it possible for people to get GPUs urgently by throwing money at it

gollark: Complaining about scalpers is just going after the obvious issues and ignoring the fact that *there are not enough GPUs*.

gollark: It might lead to more expensive GPUs in the long run due to increased segmentation killing the second hand market.

External links

Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Joseph Sunlight

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Viscount Sandon	Member of Parliament for Shrewsbury 1923 – 1924	Succeeded by Viscount Sandon

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.