Gavin Stamp
Historian and conservationist who waged a lifelong campaign against architectural vandalism
GAVIN STAMP, the architectural historian, who has died aged 69, was “Piloti” who wrote the “Nooks and Corners” column in Private Eye magazine; a television presenter of great charm and humour; a conservationist who personally saved one of the finest Arts and Crafts buildings in London; a photographer, draughtsman and writer of prodigious talent.
In 1966, the poet Christopher Logue wrote a satirical poem about the general election being held that year, the second in 17 months: “I shall vote Labour, because deep in my heart, I am a conservative.” Logue could not possibly have known it, but he was describing the character of Stamp, who would one day marry Logue’s widow, Rosemary Hill.
In his youth a man of the Right, Stamp became, by the end of his life, an impassioned defender of the European Union, and a socialist – homesick, as he openly admitted, for the England of his childhood, of free orange-juice and nationalised steam railways. He rather despised the inability of many contemporaries to change their minds.
His most celebrated piece of journalism, in the Spectator in 1985, was a defence of the telephone boxes designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, later worked into a fine illustrated book. “No vandalism meted out to a kiosk by an individual has equalled that practised systematically by British Telecom,” he wrote. The article inspired a campaign by the Spectator which led to about 2,500 of the boxes being listed.
Gavin Mark Stamp was born on the Ides of March 1948 in Bromley. He shared with his younger brother Gerard, the architectural watercolourist, an early passion for buildings. At Dulwich College, when Stamp was a boy there, there was a plan to put plate glass into some Victorian cloisters. It was his first shocked encounter with architectural vandalism, against which he would campaign with fervour for the rest of his life.
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where the archconservative John Casey was a Fellow, had a profound effect on Stamp. The prevailing ethos in English universities at that time was Leftist and anti-historical. Casey’s disciples rebelled against this by wearing suits and watchchains and polished leather shoes. Stamp was always thus attired until his forties. (In the 1980s he was labelled, with others, a “Young Fogey”).
For three years he studied Architecture under Dr David Watkin, who influenced a whole generation to rethink their ideas about modernism, and who pined for the neoclassical values which underpin the great European tradition. Stamp later distanced himself from the ethos of Peterhouse Right, finding their misogyny and anti-semitism so repellent as to call into question their aesthetic judgments.
But he retained an intense and very Cambridge intellectual seriousness. When he left the university he moved to London and gravitated to the Architectural Press in Queen Anne’s Gate. The Bride of Denmark, the Victorian pub in the basement there, was where he formed many of his lasting friendships, including that of his hero John Betjeman.
Stamp became close friends with both the Betjemans. With Sir John, he would enjoy long lunches at the Ritz, and jokes about the 1890s, while imbibing the poet’s passion for architectural conservation.
Betjeman had started the “Nooks and Corners” column in Private Eye, devoted to exposing the vandalism of plansters, bishops and others who were intent on wrecking England. After Betjeman ran out of steam, he recommended that Stamp should take the column over. He wrote it every fortnight for the rest of his life, lambasting fraud and vandalism with even-handed anger. Penelope Betjeman also woke in Stamp his fascination with India, where she had been born and on whose architecture she was a distinguished expert.
At this time he also worked at the RIBA Drawings Collection with John Harris. Stamp was responsible for a memorable exhibition there of War Memorials from the First World War. He designed and drew the catalogue and found many things of overlooked value and beauty.
His own architectural drawings were exquisite. His drawings of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, the “cathedral of Arts and Crafts” in Belgravia, illustrated his impassioned pamphlet written to support Betjeman’s successful campaign to save that great building from demolition.
The architect Roderick Gradidge was another friend made at this time. Born in India, like Penelope Betjeman, Gradidge educated Stamp in the ways of English architects in the subcontinent – above all Lutyens, but many others less well-known. Gradidge, his long hair plaited in a pigtail, his tree-trunk legs visible beneath a kilt, was a distinctive figure with the barking voice of an Indian Army colonel. He was an advanced Anglo-catholic, and Stamp, who had loved church architecture since he was a boy, began to be a churchgoer.
Somewhat to the horror of Gradidge and other bachelor friends, Stamp married Alexandra Artley, a clever English graduate from the University of Leeds, who worked as a secretary at the Architectural Press and would eventually establish a name for herself as a witty columnist in glossy magazines. The bachelors never appreciated the fact that Stamp was always deeply attracted to clever women. The Stamps had two daughters, Agnes, named after the lost church of St Agnes Kennington, and Cecilia.
Since neither Stamp nor his wife did anything which a building society would have regarded as useful, they were unable to get a mortgage, but Barclays Bank Redcar (Artley’s local bank) lent them £50,000 to buy an elegant little house near King’s Cross Station – 1, St Chad Street. It became a mecca for all their friends, and they held more or less open house. Gavin would stand by the old-fashioned hissing gas-fire (bought from architectural salvage) dispensing whisky, while Alex, puffing cigarettes at the other corner of the room (a habit of which Stamp hotly disapproved) would keep their friends howling with laughter.
One of the children, surveying the everlastingly unfinished process of “restoration” in which their house existed – the bags of cement, the neatly hung architectural prints on the scraped, but undecorated walls – once asked, “Why don’t we live in a house like other people’s houses?” Alex immortalised their domestic chaos in her columns, eventually turned into a book, called Hoorah for the Filth Packets.
Stamp always said he would never take a job and never leave London. He continued to write the Piloti column, to turn out a series of well-received books, and to join the likes of Colin Amery and Dan Cruikshank, Lucy Lambton and the Betjemans in trying to prevent the wreckage of Britain.
But the Stamps were poor and it was flattering to be asked to become the Professor of Architectural History at the Mackintosh School of Art in 1990. They sold the St Chad Street house before the property boom really took off – and always regretted doing so. In Glasgow, they bought the house built by the neoclassical architect Greek Thomson, and started the Greek Thomson Society. (Stamp loved societies, was a keen member of the Victorian Society and was the founder member of the 1930s Society, which morphed into the Twentieth Century Society).
He was much loved in Glasgow. His lectures were dazzling slideshows, with more than 200 images per lecture, as he shared his encyclopaedic knowledge and infectious enthusiasm. But it was a taxing time domestically. His marriage unravelled, and when he returned to live in London, it was alone.
He told Glasgow friends that he was homesick for the sight of the backs of London stockbrick houses, seen from the train. He went to live in what was in effect a bedsit in Forest Hill.
Although he had produced many fine books, including those which reflected his passion for photography, Stamp never wrote the single great architectural monograph that might have been expected. In some ways his most beautiful book is The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. It reflects his passion for Lutyens, and his obsession with the First World War. It is also a demonstration of his brilliance as a writer, with what he called “a sense of the eternally tragic”.
In the last phase of his life, Stamp, the hater of cigarettes, fell in love with another smoker, Rosemary Hill, biographer of Augustus Welby Pugin. They married. It was a meeting of minds, as well as a love match.
Gavin Stamp, born March 15 1948, died December 30 2017