Gavin Stamp, who has died aged 69 after suffering from cancer, was an architectural historian and campaigner whose scholarship and enthusiasm promoted the understanding and reputation of several great but neglected architects, and helped save many fine 19th and 20th century buildings (he would say not nearly enough) from the wrecker’s ball. As a writer and conservationist he followed a tradition set by John Betjeman and Ian Nairn, both of whom he admired, and for nearly 40 years his pseudonymous column in Private Eye waged war on the property developers and planning authorities who disfigured British towns with their greed and ineptitude. Stamp concluded that their disregard for history, especially in the shape of Victorian buildings, was a form of national self-hatred.
His passion for buildings first appeared when, as a boarder at Dulwich college, he filled his weekends by exploring the streets of south London and southern suburbs such as Bromley, where he was born. Like most pupils in the days of the so-called Dulwich Experiment, he had a free place at the school (funded by a local authority grant) – a fact that he was keen to stress later in life whenever he was mistaken for a typical product of a paid education.
His ancestry was distinguished but nonconformist by tradition and neither lavish nor rich. One great-uncle, Josiah Stamp (later Lord Stamp), was an economist and public servant who rose to become chairman of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway; another great-uncle, Sir Dudley Stamp, was an eminent geographer. Their father had been manager of WH Smith’s railway bookstall in Wigan before coming south to establish a small London grocery chain, Cave Austin, which his grandson, Gavin’s father, Barry, inherited and – in the face of competition from the new supermarkets – failed to sustain; Gavin’s mother, Norah (nee Rich), had also been involved in the business, travelling around in her mini to inspect the stores. Later Barry became a driving instructor, which some people think explained Gavin’s life-long hatred of cars. He never learned to drive one.
At Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he took a history degree that included architectural history, and back again in south London, this time in a bedsit, began to piece together a freelance life that revolved around the Architectural Press, publisher of the Architectural Review. He was a fine and largely self-taught draughtsman and drew sketches and plans for the anti-modernist architect Roderick Gradidge, and helped the curator John Harris catalogue the Royal Institute of British Architects’ drawings collection; some years later, in 1977, he organised and designed the catalogue for the RIBA’s Silent Cities exhibition on the war memorials of the first world war, which was the start of a lasting absorption with that war’s physical remembrance.
His visits to the offices of the Architectural Press – and, just as important, to the pub beneath it in Queen Anne’s Gate – introduced him to celebrated contributors such as Osbert Lancaster, Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner. He became particularly close to Betjeman and it was at Betjeman’s suggestion that Stamp took over the Private Eye column, Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism, that the poet had founded in 1971 and that his daughter Candida had continued.
Stamp took the pseudonym Piloti, which are the piers on which a lot of modernist architecture rests, and wrote his first column in 1978. His last, published only a week before he died and as pungent as always, suggested that Britain needed some new architectural prizes: the Attila the Hun award for vandalism that never ceases (won this year by Liverpool city council “for its cynical indifference to World Heritage status”); and the Emperor Nero award for fiddling while Rome burns (won by the House of Commons for its reluctance to leave a decaying building, because MPs understand too well that its magnificence is the only thing that still “gives dignity and status to this collection of mediocrities”).
It would be fair to say that by the early 1980s, Stamp gave a very good impression of a Young Fogey. He had a Cambridge PhD in the work of an early hero, the Victorian Gothicist George Gilbert Scott junior, the son of the more famous George Gilbert Scott senior, and lived in a little house with his wife, the writer Alexandra Artley, almost in the shadows of the senior Scott’s most famous creation, St Pancras station. He wrote for the Spectator and the age of denim never touched him: he wore tweed jacket, scarves and polished shoes.
London seemed his inevitable home, until in 1990 he took a job lecturing in architectural history at the Glasgow School of Art and moved with his family to a terrace house built and inhabited by the Scottish architect Alexander “Greek” Thomson in the mid 19th century. Stamp became one of Thomson’s great champions at a time when his architectural legacy was imperilled (as a few of his buildings still are), and founded a society in Thomson’s name that helped elevate his reputation close to that of a later Glasgow architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Stamp became a senior lecturer and then a professor in Glasgow, and made friends with unfogeyish Glaswegians such as the former shipyard worker and Marxist Jimmy Reid – a man he tremendously admired. But the Glasgow years were eventually unhappy: the restoration of his house was unaffordable, his marriage failed, and in 2003 he returned to London, where he worked as a writer and occasional lecturer.
In 2014, he married Rosemary Hill, the biographer of Augustus Pugin and widow of the poet Christopher Logue, for whom Stamp had designed a handsome memorial stele in Kensal Green cemetery much in the style of Greek Thomson and erected the year before. The wedding party, befitting Stamp’s 20-odd years as chair of the Twentieth Century Society, took place in an upstairs room at the Festival Hall.
Stamp’s scholarship deepened our understanding of architects such as Scott, Thomson and Edwin Lutyens, as well as more minor figures including Robert Weir Schultz, who worked for the medievalist John Crichton-Stuart, third Marquess of Bute. He was among the first writers to take a serious interest in the colonial architecture of India, and his early concern about the fate of the telephone boxes designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (grandson of the first GG Scott) inspired the campaign that saved many of them.
In later life, he sometimes fretted that he had “wasted his time” writing journalism and catalogue introductions rather than “proper books”. Nevertheless, his short history of Lutyens’ great building at Thiepval, The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (2006), has taken its place among the most memorable accounts of the western front: a book that has all Stamp’s characteristic anger, lucidity and compassion.
The same qualities moved Stamp leftwards in his politics, until the Britain he was born into, Attlee’s Britain, became a kind of rear-mirror utopia. His last wishes specified an Anglican funeral ceremony and a south London cemetery – and that in the coffin he wore the lapel badge of his last great cause: “Bugger Brexit”. Through his journalism, his campaigning work and his fierce independence, it was Stamp, arguably more than any writer since Betjeman, who made sure that architecture remains high in the list of British public concerns.
He is survived by Rosemary; and by the two daughters of his first marriage, Agnes and Cecilia.
• Gavin Mark Stamp, journalist and architectural historian, born 15 March 1948; died 30 December 2017
• This article was amended on 9 January 2018. Gavin Stamp’s PhD was on the work of George Gilbert Scott junior rather than George Gilbert Scott senior. He raised concerns about the fate of the telephone boxes designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, the first GG Scott’s grandson.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jan/07/gavin-stamp-obituary
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