JAMES WILLIAM THOMSON
James William Thomson: the Scottish architect of Algeciras's Villa Vieja James William Thomson was a Scottish architect who, between the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, shaped much of the English Algeciras that can still be glimpsed today in some of its facades and gardens. Though he is now almost entirely forgotten, few names are so closely bound up with the character the town took on under the British colony and the Algeciras-Gibraltar railway. The researcher Ana Aranda Bernal, who has devoted much of her work to tracing the English architecture of the Campo de Gibraltar, describes him as an architect and clerk of works, entrusted with overseeing in Spain the buildings that other British architects — such as Ralph Selden Wornum or Thomas Edward Collcutt — designed from afar, without ever setting foot on the site. He was, so to speak, the local hands and eyes of an architecture conceived in London and built here. The Algeciras he built His...
