Architect built on fierce principles to challenge authority
then for the Greater London Council, on expanded towns in the southeast and East Anglia.
He became disillusioned by the realisation that he was designing dwellings for thousands of people whom he never met.
This mechanistic mass production of buildings, in which the occupants played no part, was replaced for Alan by the practices of community architecture and planning, in which the inhabitants are engaged in the process, playing a central and active role.
In Alan’s own words, the terms which defined his life from 1973 onwards were “community, public participation, localness and smallness of scale”; all characteristics absent both from his architectural education and from his employment in Runcorn and London.
One of the forms of practice which replaced large-scale modernist production in the early 70s was the government’s Inner Area Studies, which included a focus on local character, and promoted the improvement of older housing instead of its wholesale clearance and replacement.
One of the pioneering studies was based in Small Heath. In 1975 Alan came to Birmingham, joined the team running the study, from the architecture and planning firm Llewellyn-Davies Weeks ForestierWalker, and continued to live in Small Heath until his death.
The house in which Alan lived with his wife Hazel, whom he married in 1972, was itself illustrative of his social and economic beliefs. The Clawleys joined the Small Heath Park Housing Co-operative, which built a cluster of houses for its members, completed in 1984.
They were Green Party members from the same time, regularly standing as candidates in local wards at council elections, including last week’s election, where Alan was on the ballot for Bordesley Green.
The community technical aid movement, which flourished during the 70s and 80s, made the professional services of people like architects accessible to sectors of society previously distant from them.
In Birmingham the Inner City Partnership Programme funded Community Networks and the Digbeth Trust, for whom Alan acted as community technical aid worker between 1984 and 1992, enabling many community groups to obtain design and development advice.
Alan was born in Liverpool. His parents were Salvation Army officers, and Alan moved several times as they were allocated new posts around the country.
It is likely that Alan gained much of his social conscience and his inherent asceticism from his upbringing. He was a quiet and modest man, but fiercely principled, and willing to fight for a cause.
In recent years he became best-known for his passionate championing, as co-founder of the Friends of the Central Library, of John Madin’s 1974 building.
It is perhaps surprising, on the face of it, that someone dedicated to post-modern modes of community advocacy, and small-scale and local grassroots development, should be so passionate about a monumental piece of modern concrete Brutalism.
But it was in fact all of a piece. Alan admired the Central Library’s rigour, austerity and honesty, as well as its ethical virtues of architecture in public service. As a Green Party activist, he was also opposed to the wasteful destruction of a building which could be reused.
Alan was a keen mountain walker, seeking out elevated rocky landscapes, and also greatly attracted by Norman cathedrals.
It is perhaps not fanciful to see Alan responding to tough characteristics in Madin’s library that were similar to what he found in those places.
Alan was not afraid to challenge power and authority, and systematically countered the various dubious arguments put forward by the council and developers for the library’s demolition.
Through his advocacy he became a great admirer of Madin, and wrote his biography, published in 2011. He later wrote Library Story, the history of the Central Library and its eventual fate (2016). In between he wrote Batsford’s Birmingham Then and Now (2013).
At his death he had completed the draft of a book on the history of planning and architecture in Birmingham from the 19th century onwards, and I hope to see this edited and published.
Alan leaves his wife Hazel, their children Jonathan and Alison, and two grandchildren.
Alan Clawley was born December 4, 1943 and died on April 30, 2018. Joe Holyoak is a Birmingham
based architect