Colin Amery
Urbane and likeable architectural writer who campaigned to save some of Britain’s best buildings
COLIN AMERY, who has died aged 74, was an architectural historian, campaigner and journalist, and an architectural adviser to the Prince of Wales, with an eclectic range of knowledge, spanning the history of buildings from Georgian London to imperial St Petersburg, to the concrete Brutalism of the National Theatre.
The former Director of Development for the Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Architecture, he gave expert advice to the traditionalist prince. Still, as architectural critic of the Financial Times for 20 years, assistant editor of the Architectural Review and author of countless books, pamphlets and articles, he was always ready to praise modern architecture when it succeeded and curse it when it failed. A figure of great warmth and charm, he was Director of the World Monuments Fund in Britain for almost a decade and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
He first came to prominence in the 1970s as part of a valiant band of campaigning architectural historians, horrified by the destruction of Georgian London. Along with Gavin Stamp, Mark Girouard and Dan Cruickshank, he was instrumental in saving much of Spitalfields in the East End. In 1975 he co-authored, with Cruickshank, The Rape of Britain. With an introduction by Sir John Betjeman, the book laid out the horrors inflicted on the country’s architectural treasures in the name of progress and development.
Amery was a founding member, with Girouard and Cruickshank, of the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust, under the chairmanship of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. And he was prominent among the street-fighting architectural historians who took to the barricades to save the Georgian buildings on the fringe of the City.
In 1977, alongside Girouard and other campaigners, he staged a sit-in at numbers seven and nine Elder St, two 18th-century weavers’ houses which had had their roofs removed by British Land in preparation for demolition and development. The buildings were saved.
In 1981, Amery joined another sit-in, to stop the bulldozers destroying St Botolph’s Hall, Spital Square, a fine red-brick building in Flemish Renaissance style. The campaigners prevailed and, today, the hall is home to La Chapelle restaurant. The Trust saved many of Spitalfields’s finest Georgian houses – now considered architectural treasures in a highly fashionable quarter of London.
Born on May 29 1944, Colin Amery, the younger son of Kenneth and Florence Amery, was educated at King’s College London and the University of Sussex. He later became a Visiting Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He originally studied Law, which he found excruciatingly dull, before turning to architectural history. He always retained something of the look of a Dickensian lawyer, with his domed forehead and small, round spectacles. In character, he was the complete opposite of a pettifogging solicitor, with a mischievous, ironic wit and gentle manners.
He began his career at the Town and Country Planning Association before, in 1970, becoming Assistant Editor of the Architectural Review – the “Archie Rev”, as it was dubbed by John Betjeman, who worked there between 1930 and 1935. In 1979, Amery became architectural editor of the FT, where he remained for 20 years.
From the mid-1970s a tide of books poured forth from his pen. His earlier works were largely on historic architecture: from Period Houses and their Details (1974) to The Victorian Buildings of London, 1837-87 (1980, with Gavin Stamp). He wrote books, too, about Christopher Wren, Lutyens and the architecture of British Empire.
It was striking, though, that, as early as 1977, Amery was writing about the National Theatre, Sir Denys Lasdun’s Brutalist building on the South Bank – now largely admired but, when it was built in 1976, much attacked for its uncompromising modernism.
Throughout his career, Amery nimbly negotiated the tightrope between modernism and tradition. As an adviser to the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery from 1985 to 1991, he helped choose the design built by post-modernists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Their design trumped the brutal scheme put forward by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek – the scheme compared by the Prince of Wales to a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. In 1991, Amery wrote A Celebration of Art and Architecture: the National Gallery Sainsbury Wing.
Prince Charles depended greatly on Amery’s architectural advice and friendship. From 1990 to 1998, Amery sat on the Duchy of Cornwall Commercial Property Development Committee. He also sat on the Fabric Advisory Committee for St George’s Chapel, the great Perpendicular church in Windsor Castle where monarchs have latterly been buried and in which Prince Harry married Meghan Markle earlier this year. From 1993 to 1996, he was the Director of Development for the Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Architecture, a charity teaching traditional urban design.
Amery also advised his friend, Lord Rothschild, on new buildings at Rothschild’s Waddesdon estate in Buckinghamshire. In 2011, Amery published a book on the new Rothschild archive building there, Windmill Hill, Waddesdon: Architecture, Archives and Art.
Although he moved easily among the great and the good, he was no martyr to the stiff, engraved invitation. Underneath all the urbanity and badinage, he was a campaigner at heart. As director of the British division of the international conservation organisation the World Monuments Fund, he did much to raise money and save some of Britain’s best buildings.
Among them was Nicholas Hawksmoor’s 1731 church St George’s, Bloomsbury, subject of a 2008 book by Amery, with Gavin Stamp and the Hawksmoor aficionado, Kerry Downes. Together with the Paul Mellon Estate, the World Monuments Fund, under Amery’s guidance, renovated the church in 2007, with a new gallery to match the original.
The WMF also recreated Hawksmoor’s staggering spire at St George’s. A copy of the fourth century BC Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the ancient seven wonders of the world, the spire is topped with a statue of George I, protected by the lion and unicorn of the royal coat of arms. The lion and unicorn had been removed in 1871 as “very doubtful ornaments”.
Amery was instrumental in WMF’S conservation of old St Petersburg, about which he wrote a book, with Brian Curran, in 2006. Also with Curran, he wrote The Lost World of Pompeii (2002), another conservation project backed by the WMF.
For all his Stakhanovite work ethic, Amery always seemed deceptively languid, ever ready for a gossip and a conspiratorial chat with his friends and colleagues.
It was a particularly cruel fate that, in his last years, he should be struck by Parkinson’s and Multiple System Atrophy. MSA deprived him of the ability to tour the buildings of Britain and the world, confining him to his Battersea home.
But his mind remained as sharp as ever, and he kept in touch with his hundreds of friends through Facebook. He was deeply touched to receive a consoling handwritten letter from the Prince of Wales during his illness.
He was looked after unstintingly by Robin Ballance, whom he married in 2014.
Colin Amery, born May 29 1944, died August 11 2018