Arthur Joseph Penty’s architectural career began as an apprentice in his father’s office in York.
 

After a few years which saw him turn his hand not just to architecture but to furniture restoration, both in London and New York, he found himself employed in the office of Raymond Unwin in 1908, working on the new Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Before and after the War, Penty produced volumes of written work, and numerous articles and essays, beginning with his first book in 1906, The Restoration of the Gild System did much to inspire the guild socialist movement.
 

During his years under Unwin at Hampstead, Penty designed two of the Suburb’s most distinctive buildings in Arcade House and Temple Fortune House which serve as perhaps the grandest gateway into the area when approached from Finchley Road.

Modelled after Bavarian towns like Rothenburg ob der Tauber which had inspired Unwin so much, and inspired by his own travels in Germany, Penty designed a pair of wide buildings with arcades and shop fronts along the high street, with balconied flats above, topped off by Germanic towers on either side of Hampstead Way.
 

Attribution of Penty’s work for Parker and Unwin, as with other draughtsman preparing drawings for that office, is ambiguous. He treasured the guildsman’s principle of creative anonymity, and the identification of his works has depended on testimonies of his wife and son.
 

Unwin’s recognition of Penty’s skill was underlined by him acting as one of Penty’s proposers in his application for Licentiateship of the RIBA in 1911.

Penty’s other contributions to the Suburb include 3 and 5 Hampstead Way. This pair of houses appears as a simplified Elizabethan manor house. No. 3 Wildwood Rise is a detached house with a central circular window in the front gable.
 

During the war he worked variously on the housing department for the London County Council, and London Underground’s advertising section.
 

After the war he had a number of short- term architectural jobs, but concentrated thereafter on social and political thought, and his writing.
 

Penty’s biographer Peter Grosvenor writes that ‘for Penty a society’s morality was expressed in its buildings. … [He] favoured the vernacular, or Queen Anne style, which he regarded as the legitimate successor to Gothic in the English architectural tradition.’ Penty’s work culminated in the publication of The Elements of Domestic Design in 1930; he died in January 1937.