Professor David Watkin
Architectural historian who promoted neoclassicism and made his name by taking a tilt at Pevsner
PROFESSOR DAVID WATKIN, who has died aged 77, was an architectural historian who devoted his life to the promotion of the classical ideal in architecture through writing, teaching and patronage; he was a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and a member of the 1970s New Right intellectual circle which gathered around Maurice Cowling.
Watkin’s scholarly contributions to the history of British architecture – in particular of the 18th and 19th centuries – are impressive, but he will always be remembered for the polemic Morality and Architecture, in which he aimed to undermine the 20th century Modernist consensus which had been promoted by his old supervisor, Nikolaus Pevsner. This adversarial book stirred enormous interest within the profession – most of it hostile, but among the dissenters was John Betjeman, who called it “a brave and lonely book”.
David John Watkin was born in Salisbury on April 7 1941 and educated at Farnham Grammar School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, from which he graduated with First Class honours in the newly established Fine Arts tripos under Michael Jaffé. He began a doctoral thesis under the direction of Pevsner on the neoclassical arbiter elegantiarum Thomas Hope, which was published to acclaim in 1968.
At a time when many of his colleagues were chasing the Gothic Revival he preferred the warmer shores of neoclassicism. It was the enrichment of the classical tradition that became the subject of his next book, probably his masterpiece, The Life and Work of CR Cockerell (1974).
Enjoyed as much for the elegance of Watkins’s writing as for his scholarship, it won the Hitchcock medallion and was followed by another 30 significant books, including his 1986 survey, A History of Western Architecture, which demonstrated his great gift of exposition and is still a standard textbook.
Watkin’s life was changed by a chance encounter with Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, Cambridge University’s Roman Catholic chaplain and a charming half-spanish priest who held decidedly old fashioned views about education, religion and women. He converted Watkin to Catholicism and they became inseparable companions, especially after Gilbey left Cambridge to continue his mission from the Travellers’ Club in London.
In 1977 Watkin published Morality and Architecture, his critique of the dogmas of the Modern Movement and the historiographical tradition that had supported them during the previous two decades. It was a necessary corrective which shocked many in the architectural world and the book provided one of the earliest philosophical and critical attempts to undermine the notion of the Zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”) – a demolition of architectural determinism.
Watkin would refer to it as “my wicked book”, and it outraged the fans of the dying Pevsner as much as the modernist architects. Reyner Banham accused Watkin of “a kind of vindictiveness of which only Christians seem capable”. Nevertheless the book had a wide impact and opened up the debate which informed the Prince of Wales’s intervention in the National Gallery “carbuncle affair”.
Watkin was a brilliant lecturer and teacher fondly remembered by his pupils, with whom he would play the role of the old fashioned don to take them on expeditions. He also, however, became the object of sinister speculation among those who took his teasing – for instance wearing an armband on the anniversary of the death of General Franco – too seriously.
To his protégés Watkin was amusing, kindly and encouraging, especially during supervisions that took place in his elegant rooms on St Peter’s Terrace, Cambridge, which he furnished with beautiful objects and lined with mezzotints of Cavaliers, Jacobites and Tories. In the evening he could be persuaded to play Schubert on his grand piano or entertain his guests with Noël Coward’s Nina from Argentina.
He invariably dressed in doublebreasted suits, making a conspicuous contrast to his Carnaby Street-clad colleague and collaborator Robin Middleton, with whom he published Neoclassical and 19th-century Architecture (1980). Watkin’s success as a teacher may be gauged by the extraordinary number of his pupils in senior positions in the art world.
With the arrival of Hugh Trevorroper at Peterhouse in 1980, Watkin aligned himself with the Cowling Tory faction, opposed to the new Master’s Whiggish reforms. There followed an unedifying power struggle and a turbulent period in Watkin’s life. A gauche side to Watkin’s character emerged, which allowed him to turn up to a fancy dress party in inappropriate costume, causing his college and himself embarrassment.
Watkin’s life then stabilised, thanks to his friendship with his former pupil, Paul Doyle, who later acquired for him a beautiful 16th century house in King’s Lynn to which he retired. Here Watkin added a library designed by John Simpson and inspired by Soane’s work at Aynhoe. Indeed it was the promotion of the modern classical architects that became the main preoccupation of his later life, in which he supported and was supported by the Prince of Wales.
This culminated in Simpson being asked to rebuild the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace (then under the direction of a former pupil, Sir Hugh Roberts). Watkin’s influence was no doubt also behind the classical commissions at two Cambridge colleges – Simpson at Caius and Quinlan Terry at Downing. He wrote monographs on both these architects and was an enthusiastic supporter of the theorist and urban planner Leon Krier, best known for his work at Poundbury.
Watkin exercised considerable influence on several committees: he sat for fifteen years on the Historic Buildings Council of England, and was vice-chairman of the Georgian Group, where his attempts to support contemporary classical architects were resisted. Almost his last great work of scholarship, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures, was published in 1996; he gave two lectures on the subject dressed in Regency costume: a professorship followed in 2001.
Seven years later many of his former pupils contributed to a festschrift, The Persistence of the Classical (2008) edited by Frank Salmon with essays by amongst others: Gavin Stamp, Roger Scruton, Alan Powers, Barry Bergdoll and Charles Saumarez Smith. His last years were spent happily between his King’s Lynn library and visits to the family of his beloved sister in Cheshire, his various pupils and Brooks’s Club.
His hair remained resolutely black until the end.