William Wilkins (31 August 1778 – 31 August 1839) was an English architect, classical scholar and archaeologist. He designed the National Gallery and University College London, and buildings for several Cambridge colleges. Life Wilkins was born in the parish of St Giles, Norwich, the son of William Wilkins (1751–1815), a successful builder who also managed the Norwich Theatre Circuit, a chain of theatres. His younger brother George Wilkins became Archdeacon of Nottingham. He was educated at Norwich School and then won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He graduated as 6th wrangler in 1800. With the award of the Worts Travelling Bachelorship in 1801, worth £100 for three years, he was able to visit the classical antiquities Greece, Asia Minor, and Magna Græcia in Italy between 1801 and 1804. On his tour he was accompanied by the Italian landscape painter Agostino Aglio, whom Wilkins had commissioned as a draughtsman on the expedition. Aglio supplied the drawings for the aquatint plates of monuments illustrating Wilkins' volumes from the expedition, such as The Antiquities of Magna Graecia (1807). Wilkins was a member of the Society of Dilettanti from 1817. He published researches into both Classical and Gothic architecture, becoming one of the leading figures in the English Greek Revival of the early 19th century. His architectural career began in 1804 with his Greek-revival designs for the newly established Downing College, Cambridge. The commission came after earlier plans in a Palladian style by James Wyatt had been rejected as insufficiently classical. Wilkins arranged the college buildings around a single large courtyard. Construction began in 1807 and proceeded slowly, coming to a halt in 1821 with Wilkins' scheme still incomplete. In 1806, Wilkins designed a college near Hertford for the East India Company. It became Haileybury College following the dissolution of the company. He built or added to Osberton House, near Worksop. These works were followed in 1808 by the Doric entrance to the Lower Assembly Rooms at Bath, and a villa at North Berwick for Sir H. D. Hamilton. At Grange Park, Northington, Hampshire, in 1809, Wilkins encased and remodelled an existing seventeenth-century house, giving it something of the form of a Greek temple, with a large Doric portico at one end. In 1815, Wilkins inherited his father's chain of six theatres. He continued to manage them for the rest of his life, and rebuilt or remodelled several of them, occasionally