in 1842
Gothic mansions Shaw worked with
Humphrey Repton, remodelling
Lord Uxbridge's property at Beaudesert, and was later employed to redesign parts of
Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire by Colonel
Thomas Wildman who had just bought the estate from
Lord Byron. Between 1821 and 1826 he rebuilt
Ilam Hall in Staffordshire in the Gothic style for the manufacturer Jesse Watts Russell.
Christ's Hospital In 1816 Shaw was appointed architect to
Christ's Hospital school, then sited in
Newgate Street in the
City of London. In 1825 the governors of the school asked him to build a new great hall for the school. He employed a gothic style, with buttresses, battlements and pinnacles, designing a large rectangular building, with octagonal towers housing staircases at either end. The Great Hall itself, long, was on the upper floor, lit by nine large windows filling the spaces between the buttresses. Various other functions were housed in ground floor and basement. Along the front of the ground floor, facing Newgate Street, was an open granite arcade long, built of granite. The upper parts of this frontage were of
Portland stone, while the rest of the building was brick.
Charles Locke Eastlake commentedNeither in the basement nor in any part of the building which is out of public sight were any pains taken to preserve a structural consistency of design. The Gothic of that day was, it must be confessed, little better than a respectable deception. It put a good face on its principal elevations, but left underground offices and back premises to take care of themselves. Shaw also built school's infirmary (1822), and the "New Schools", a block in a Tudor style, in yellow brick with stone facings. This had a covered cloister running along the front, and staircases at each end of the building housed in rectangular projections surmounted by pinnacles and domes. All these buildings were demolished when the site was cleared for new buildings for the General Post Office, following the school's removal to
Horsham in 1902.
Ramsgate As architect to
Ramsgate Harbour in
Kent he designed the clock house, the Jacob's Ladder stairway and an obelisk commemorating
King George IV passing through the port on a journey to Hanover.
St Dunstan-in-the-West Shaw's last work, considered his
masterpiece, is the church of
St Dunstan-in-the-West on
Fleet Street in the
City of London. It is suggested that he based the tower on
St Helen's in York although the tower more closely resembles that of St Botolph’s Church in
Boston, Lincolnshire (known as the
Boston Stump) and designed an unusual octagonal tower in the gothic style. Shaw died in 1832 before the church was finished and left the remaining work to his son,
John Shaw Jr., whom he had trained at his office in Christ's Hospital. The Shaws were pioneers in the development of
semi-detached housing in London, breaking away from the common design of terraced housing. ==Societies and exhibitions==