Early years Reilly was born on the Seven Sisters Road in
Manor House, London, the son of the architect and surveyor Charles Reilly (1844–1928) and his wife Annie,
née, Mee. Whilst Reilly was still very young, the family moved to a large Regency period house, just nearby on Woodberry Down. His family remained in the same house for the next two decades He was educated at a preparatory school in
Hove between the ages of nine and 13, and then at
Merchant Taylors' School, London, and
Queens' College, Cambridge. As an undergraduate he helped to found the Cambridge branch of the
Fabian Society; In 1898, Reilly became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (
RIBA). Reilly, on the other hand, was more interested in design than in the mechanics of construction. In 1902, Reilly applied unsuccessfully for the chair of architecture at
University College, London. His proposed design was in the English
Neo-Classical style, with a large central dome in the tradition of
Wren's
St Paul's. The assessors of the competition were
G F Bodley, a leading exponent of the Gothic style, and
Norman Shaw. Reilly's design was one of eight highly commended entries that failed to gain inclusion in the final shortlist of five; it was the only classical design among them.
Giles Gilbert Scott's Gothic design was the eventual winner, but Reilly had made influential contacts in Liverpool, where much of his career came to be centred. In an attempt to offer an alternative route into the profession, the University College of Liverpool, the forerunner of
Liverpool University, set up a degree course in architecture in 1894. The first professor was Frederick Moore Simpson, a proponent of the
Arts and Crafts style of building, which Reilly regarded as "a partial but insufficient remedy for Victorian failure." The main building of the university, in which Reilly was at first based, was designed by his bête noir, Waterhouse. Reilly described it as having "glazed tiles the colour of curry powder". With Lever's encouragement and generous financial backing, Reilly persuaded the University to establish a Department of Civic Design within the School of Architecture. The University authorities accepted Reilly's recommendation that the first Professor of Civic Design should be
Stanley Adshead, a fellow-classicist and friend from his days in Belcher's practice. The importance of the work of the Liverpool School was quickly recognised within the architectural profession. Reilly was invited to join the RIBA's Board of Architectural Education in 1906, and he was elected to the Council of the RIBA in 1909. In 1911, Reilly and Adshead led the opposition to a plan by Norman Shaw and the sculptor
W Goscombe John to remodel the south front of
St George's Hall in Liverpool. Shaw and John proposed to install a grandiose flight of entrance steps, flanked by equestrian statues in tribute to the recently dead
King Edward VII. Reilly regarded the plan as an
Edwardian Baroque subversion of the hall's "pure and sublime neo-classical concept". store, 1934. Despite Mackintosh's animadversions, Reilly was willing to find merit in architectural work of other styles than his own. In a 1931 volume,
Representative British Architects of the Present Day, he devoted chapters not only to kindred spirits such as Adshead, but to a Gothic revivalist,
Walter Tapper, and an Arts and Crafts advocate,
Guy Dawber; others included were
Herbert Baker, Blomfield,
Clough Williams-Ellis,
Edwin Lutyens, and Scott.
The Times Literary Supplement observed, "No praise can be too high for the way in which the special aptitudes of the particular architects are brought forward and illustrated from their works."
Later years By 1938, in the view of
The Times Literary Supplement, the Liverpool School of Architecture was "possibly … the most important centre of architectural education in the world." Later in his career, Reilly moved away from an exclusive classicism. Advances in building techniques and materials and the construction of taller and wider buildings in cities made neo-classicism unsustainable. Reilly's pupil
Maxwell Fry recalled being dismayed in 1928 at seeing classical stone facings being hung on the steel frame of a huge block in London, to which Reilly was consultant architect. Fry embraced modernism, and his former teacher later followed him. In 1934, another Reilly pupil,
William Crabtree, designed the modernist
Peter Jones building in
Sloane Square, with Reilly as consultant architect. Stamp suggests that Reilly may have come to regret his exclusive promotion of classicism at Liverpool; he quotes a letter from Reilly to Giles Gilbert Scott in 1942: "The Liverpool fellows in my time did all go through the discipline of classical architecture. Except for the precision of its rules, I wish now it had been Gothic, for Gothic with its constructional basis is much nearer to modern stuff with its steel and ferroconcrete." Reilly died in London at the age of 73. His wife predeceased him. He was survived by a daughter and a son,
Paul Reilly, a leading designer. ==Honours and legacy==