Selma Montford Urban campaigner who fought to keep Brighton beautiful
SELMA MONTFORD, who has died aged 87, became an irrepressible campaigner for urban architecture after being galvanised by outrage at a proposal in the early 1970s to destroy Brighton railway station’s famous glass roof – a structure much admired by John Betjeman and John Piper – and sink the terminus beneath a 14-storey tower.
Her successful campaign to fend off this development led to the creation in 1973 of the influential Brighton Society, which she led for more than 40 years. She showed that small-scale buildings create the healthiest societies.
She was born Selma Nankivell on September 30 1934 in Trinidad, where her father Howard was Acting Colonial Secretary, and arrived in Britain in 1938; her Dutch-born mother, Florence, organised the first of the Kindertransports, sending 196 children to Britain from Berlin.
Howard, who had fallen foul of vested interests in Trinidad who took exception to his advocating better conditions for the labouring poor, died that year when he fell from a train in France.
While growing up in Oxford, Cornwall, and a Burgess Hill boarding school, Selma soon realised that she was “a visual kind of person”. At 16, she moved to a South Kensington ladies’ rooming house to study at St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art for several years.
In this time, she exhibited at the Royal Academy, and her work in book illustration included such volumes as Georgina Landemare’s Recipes from No 10 (1958) and Leonard Clark’s first volume of poems, Daybreak (1963). All the while she taught, including a stint at Sidcup Art College, where she helped the nascent Rolling Stones to design a poster for their concert at the College on December 12 1962.
That same year she married Adrian Montford (known as “Mont”). They moved to Brighton, where they found an elegant house in which to bring up four children.
Selma Montford insisted that the Brighton Society was about amenities, and not simply a conservation body, for she recognised Churchill’s dictum “we shape our buildings and, afterwards, they shape us”. Had she been able to fulfil an early ambition to become an architect – a maledominated trade – she would have brought that eye for detail which, instead, was trained upon the many strange shapes proposed for Brighton.
She sat through innumerable protracted meetings to make key points whether the subject was the ever-problematic Marina or, at the other end of the seafront, the 30-year battle to restore a bandstand. Another notable success was fending off a scheme for a freeway and multi-storey car park (a revival of a 1960s scheme in which a flyover would have destroyed 700 highly desirable homes).
She was instrumental in saving the Royal Alexandra Hospital and Saltdean Lido. But there were also disappointments, such as the i360 Tower rising beside the fire-damaged West Pier.
Selma Montford may have looked formal but there was always a gleam in her eye. She did not shy away from mischief, such as coining a phrase about architects suffering from “tower envy”. Her animated conversation is echoed in her many books, such as Backyard Brighton (2007) which reveals inter alia the lost houses of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock.
Well-designed, her books brought together art, photographs and memories. Her enthusiasm for teaching inspired four Urban Detective guides for children to hone their observational skills, while for adults she founded the Lewis Cohen Urban Studies Centre at Brighton Polytechnic.
Ill health led her to step down from chairing the Brighton Society in 2017, soon after its success in seeing off yet another attempt to close down Hove’s Grade Ii-listed Carnegie Library.
Selma Montford, who was appointed MBE in 2006, is survived by her husband and their four children.
Selma Montford, born September 30 1934, died April 18 2022