George William Hamilton Gordon was born on June 15, 1854, in Great Stanmore (now Stanmore), Middlesex, England.

He was educated at Eton College in England and from 1878 to 1882, he served as an assistant to a leading Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse. In 1882, he formed a new partnership in London with Sir Andrew Thomas Taylor. When Taylor emigrated to Montreal, Quebec in 1884, Gordon remained in London to handle the British branch of the business and Taylor operated the Canadian branch from a new office in Montreal. Many significant Canadian commissions followed over the next twenty years, all of them credited to “Taylor & Gordon”, yet there is no evidence that Gordon ever resided in Canada. He most likely retired from the partnership in 1888 to practise alone under his own name from offices in Moorgate Chambers in London. In 1904, Gordon moved to South Africa and became Director of Public Works in the Orange River Colony.

In 1886, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (R.I.B.A.) and nominated as a Fellow in 1906.

He died of severe dysentery on December 31, 1906, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and is buried in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England.