John Avery

John Avery was an English organ builder active in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

His date of birth is uncertain. A baptism record in Avening registers a John Avery baptised in January 1738, but the burial entry at Holy Sepulchre, London, gives his age as 52, which places his birth around 1755. Specialists favour this second date, although the first is not ruled out.

His work centred on large commissions for churches in London and other towns. These include St Stephen's, Coleman Street (1775), St John the Baptist, Croydon (1794), St Lawrence, Stroud (1798), Winchester Cathedral (1799), St Margaret's, Westminster (1804), and Carlisle Cathedral, whose organ was completed by Elliot in 1808.

Contemporaries regarded him as a competent craftsman, admired for the quantity and quality of his instruments, although he was described as an imitator of Green who nonetheless surpassed him. His personal life was less stable: according to some contemporary accounts, he suffered from alcoholism and frequent debt, and he died in a debtors' prison. His legacy rests chiefly on his organs for London churches.