Thomas Forrester (architect)

Thomas Forrester ( born May 16, 1838 in Glasgow, † March 25, 1907 ) was a New Zealand architect of Irish descent. His work is particularly associated with the city of Oamaru.

He studied at the Glasgow School of Art, before he and his family emigrated to New Zealand in 1861. There he worked in Dunedin under William Mason (1810-1897) and William Henry Clayton (1823-1877) and later Robert Arthur Lawson ( 1833-1902 ). In this job he was sent to Oamaru, to supervise the construction of the Bank of Otago branch. In 1865, he was responsible for the Dunedin Exhibition.

From 1870 he was responsible for overseeing the construction work in the port of Oamaru. He designed the breakwater and investors for the then important port. He worked his way from the Inspector of Works up to the Secretary of the Oamaru Harbour Board. In 1885 he was engineer of the Oamaru Harbour Board, and remained so until his death officially. As such, the repair of the breakwater after a storm in 1886 and the Holmes Wharf among his works. For soil samples, which he had to pull up from the ocean floor, he concluded that a dredging of the harbor would be possible, which enabled the construction of a deep-water harbor.

Together with the Jamaican John Lemon (1828-1890), he founded the company Forrester & Lemon, who built many of the listed Victorian architectural heritage Oamaru belonging buildings. Forrester Lemmon was there for the architectural side, responsible for the daily operations and the commercial side.

1882 Forrester first curator of the newly established and in the self-designed Forrester " Athenaeum " housed Oamaru museum of contemporary North Otago Museum.

Besides architecture he was interested in geology and photography. His son John Megget Forrester later took over the architectural firm.