Townsend's career was devoted mainly to domestic and small-scale ecclesiastical commissions, but his reputation rests principally on three strikingly original public buildings in London:
Bishopsgate Institute (1892–1894); the
Whitechapel Art Gallery (1895–1899, opened 1901); and the
Horniman Museum (1898–1901). These buildings are usually identified with the
Art Nouveau or
Arts and Crafts styles, but Townsend's originality makes his style difficult to classify. Service calls him a “rogue” architect.
Pevsner describes the buildings as "without question the most remarkable example of a reckless repudiation of tradition among English architects of the time". The Horniman Museum in particular moved a contemporary observer, writing in 1902, the year after the building was opened, to hail it as "a new series of frank and fearless thoughts expressed and co-ordinated in stone". Townsend seems to have been influenced by the
Romanesque Revival style of the American architect
H. H. Richardson—he was certainly familiar with that architect's work as his journalist brother, Horace Townsend, had written a lengthy article about Richardson. Notable among Townsend's other works are: All Saints,
Ennismore Gardens, London (now the Russian Orthodox Cathedral) (1892); the picturesque St. Martin,
Blackheath, Surrey (which is apparently modelled on an Italian wayside chapel) (1893); the United Free Church,
Woodford Green (1901), and
St. Mary the Virgin, Great Warley, Essex (1902). Among Townsend's employees was the Finnish architect Gustaf Strengell, in 1903, who on his return to
Finland became one of the country's most noted architect theorists, curators and critics, though practicing little as an architect. Together with friend, architect-critic Sigurd Frosterus, Strengell argued against the predominant Art Nouveau style architecture in Finland at that time (known as
Jugendstil, and epitomized by the works of
Eliel Saarinen), instead championing a more idiosyncratic modernism, of a kind that could also be seen in the works of Townsend. == Buildings ==