Edward Schroeder Prior RA (1852–1932) was a British architect, instrumental in establishing the Arts and Crafts movement. He was one of the foremost theorists of the second generation of the movement, writing extensively on architecture, art, craftsmanship and the building process and subsequently influencing the training of many architects.

He was a major contributor to the development of the Art Workers Guild and other organisations that lay at the heart of the movement's attempts to bring art, craftsmanship and architecture closer together. His scholarly work, particularly A History of Gothic Art in England (1900), achieved international acclaim. He became one of the leading architectural educationalists of his generation. As Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University he established the School of Architectural Studies.

Initially his buildings show the influence of his mentor Norman Shaw and Philip Webb, but Prior experimented with materials, massing and volume from the start of his independent practice. He developed a style that was intensely individual and a practical philosophy of construction that was perhaps nearer to Ruskin's ideal of the "builder designer" than that of any other arts and crafts architect.

The buildings of his maturity, such as The Barn, Exmouth, and Home Place, Kelling are amongst the most original of the period. In St Andrew's Church, Roker, he produced his masterpiece, a church that is now recognised as one of the best of the early 20th century.

Edward Schroeder Prior was born in Greenwich on 4 January 1852, his parents' fourth son, one of eleven children. His father John Venn Prior, who was a barrister in the Chancery division, died at the age of 43 as a result of a fall from a horse. Edward was aged 10 at the time. His mother, Hebe Catherine Prior, moved the family from their house in Croom's Hill, Greenwich to Harrow, where Edward's eldest brother John Templer was at school and where local resident families paid reduced fees for day boys. Here, next door to the house of Matthew Arnold, she started a school for children whose parents were in India, and Edward was one of its first pupils.

In 1863 at the unusually young age of 11, Edward entered Harrow School. Here his interest in natural history, art, architecture and science was fostered, particularly by F. W. Farrar, H. M. Butler and B. F. Westcott, his housemaster and private tutor. (Prior remained a committed naturalist throughout his life. His collections of Lepidoptera remain largely intact, held by the Museum of St Albans.) Prior remained connected to Harrow School and was later to design two buildings for the school.

In 1869 Prior won the Sayer Scholarship "for the promotion of classical learning and taste" to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to read the Classical Tripos. He augmented the Sayer Scholarship by also gaining a college scholarship. He matriculated in 1870, graduating B.A. in 1874, M.A. in 1877.

In the same year B. F. Westcott was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity. Prior continued to gain from his instruction in architectural drawing at Cambridge. Other influences were Matthew Digby Wyatt and Sidney Colvin, the first and second Slade Professors of Fine Art. Wyatt's lecture programme for 1871 included engraving, woodcutting, stained glass and mosaic. Prior's interest in the applied arts was probably strongly encouraged by Wyatt. Colvin, a friend of Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was elected Slade Professor in January 1873.