in a Lombardic style, with western tower and a central cupola. In July 1841 Wild built a temporary pavilion seating 2,850 at Liverpool for the "Grand Dinner of the Royal Agricultural Society". Egypt In 1842 he went to Egypt to work as an architectural draughtsman for the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius, having obtained the job through Joseph Bonomi. He left Lepsius' employment in 1844, but remained in Cairo for several years, making drawings of Islamic architecture, in which he paid particular attention to details of domestic buildings. Owen Jones later used Wild's drawings as the sole source for the chapter on Arabian design in his Grammar of Ornament, and nine of Wild's sketchbooks from this period are now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. While in Cairo he also drew up plans for a burial ground for the city's British community, which were never carried out, and in 1845 was commissioned to build the Anglican church of St Mark in Alexandria, following the rejection of a Gothic design by Anthony Salvin. Wild's church design combined features from early Christian and Islamic styles. It was completed – without its planned campanile – in 1854. Return to Britain Wild returned to Britain in 1848, having travelled via Constantinople, Italy and Spain. During the erection of Paxton's Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 he was appointed "decorative architect", his brother-in-law Owen Jones holding the post of superintendent of works. According to some sources, from 1851 he was "retained as an expert on Arabian art" to advise the newly established museum of the Department of Practical Art at Marlborough House, which later moved to South Kensington and eventually became the Victoria and Albert Museum. One well-informed obituary, however, dates this appointment to much later. In 1852 he designed a water tower at Grimsby, a side-project of the Museum's director, Henry Cole, modelling it after the tower of the Palazzo Publico in Siena. South Kensington The next 14 years of Wild's career remain obscure, and it appears that his professional activities were limited by illness, his only recorded design work during this time being a stained-glass window for the South Kensington Museum's Oriental Court, the interiors of which were designed by Owen Jones. In 1867, following the death of Francis Fowke, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Scott was appointed to oversee the development of the 1851 Exhibition Commissioners' estate in