Angus Buchanan
Pioneering historian who shed light on Britain’s industrial past
PROFESSOR ANGUS BUCHANAN, who has died aged 90, was a pioneer of industrial archaeology and an authority on Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Interest in the monuments of Britain’s industrial past emerged after the Second World War when, as Buchanan put it, “the clearing of wartime damage led directly into a craze for ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ and architectural brutalism that posed a real threat to anything left standing”. A critical event was the destruction in 1962 of the Doric Arch that formed the entrance to Euston Station, the first London main line railway terminus.
“Thus was generated the anxiety to preserve the baby from the discarded bath water out of which industrial archaeology was born,” Buchanan wrote.
The early 1960s saw a proliferation of local action groups, and in 1964 Buchanan, an assistant lecturer in Social & Economic History at the Bristol College of Advanced Technology (now Bath University) set up the Centre for the Study of the History of Technology.
In 1965, with Neil Cossons, then Curator of Technology at Bristol Museum, he established an adult evening course which stimulated such enthusiasm that in 1968 it converted itself into the Bristol Industrial Archaeological Society, with Buchanan as chairman and Cossons as secretary.
In 1968 he was a founder member, and later president, of the International Committee for the History of Technology. The conferences he organised led to the founding of the UK Association for Industrial Archaeology, of which he became president in 1975, and the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage.
He published a number of books and articles on Brunel, culminating in his Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 2002. A collaboration with George Watkins led to books and articles on the development of stationary steam engines and their manufacturers, and to the creation of the Watkins Collection of thousands of photographs of more than 200 such engines.
Buchanan’s reputation led to Bath University being chosen in 1965 to house the
National Record of Industrial Monuments and, from 1971, the staff of the national Industrial Monuments Survey. In 1972 he published Industrial Archaeology in Britain, a key introduction to the subject
Robert Angus Buchanan was born in Sheffield on June 5 1930 to Robert and Bertha, née Davis. From High Storrs Grammar School, Sheffield, he went up to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he remained to take a PHD in trade union history.
After National Service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps he began his career as an adult education officer in Stepney and became involved in the Workers Educational Association (WEA). After his appointment in 1960 as an assistant lecturer at what was then the Bristol College of Science & Technology, he resumed his WEA work at the Bristol Folk House.
At various times he held visiting lectureships in Australia, the US, Sweden and China. He was a member of the properties committee of the National Trust (1974-2001) and in the 1980s served on the Royal Commission on the Historic Monuments of England,.
Buchanan was good and lively company, tolerant of the opinions of others, though rather sceptical of authority. He inspired generations of students at Bath University with his enthusiasm for his subject.
He retired from Bath University as a professor in 1995, though he was active until recent years within its History of Technology Research Unit He was appointed OBE in 1993.
In 1955 Angus Buchanan married Brenda Wade, a fellow historian whom he had met on a school hike to the moors above Sheffield, and with whom he had two sons. She died in April.
Professor Angus Buchanan, born June 5 1930, died June 17 2020