Gavin Stamp

Gavin Mark Stamp (15 March 1948 – 30 December 2017) was a British writer and architectural historian.

Education

Stamp was educated at Dulwich College in South London from 1959 to 1967 as part of the "Dulwich Experiment",^[1] then at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained a PhD in 1978 with a thesis entitled George Gilbert Scott, junior, architect, 1839–1897.^[2]

Life and career

After a career of architectural polemic, lecturing and publishing Stamp taught architectural history from 1990, latterly as Professor, at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. He bought and restored the house that Alexander Thomson built for himself in Moray Place, Glasgow. In 2003, he resigned from the school and reverted to being an independent scholar and lecturer. He wrote the "Nooks & Corners" architecture criticism column in Private Eye, from 1978 until his death, under the pseudonym Piloti.^[3] He regularly contributed essays on architecture to the fine arts and collector's magazine Apollo. Stamp was a long-standing Trustee and former Chairman of the Twentieth Century Society, a registered charity which promotes the appreciation of modern architecture and the conservation of Britain's architectural heritage.^[4] He was also active in the Victorian Society in various capacities over five decades.

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C467/48) with Gavin Stamp in 2000 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.^[5]

Television appearances

Stamp presented a number of programmes about architecture for Channel 5. In 2005 he presented Pevsner’s Cities: Liverpool and Pevsner’s Cities: Newcastle and in 2006 Pevsner's Cities: Oxford;^[6] each programme profiled the cities with reference to the writings of architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. In 2007 he presented a five-part architectural travel series Gavin Stamp's Orient Express.^[7] Stamp travelled by train along the original Orient Express route, stopping off on the way to look at architecture and to see how the history of Eastern Europe is told in its buildings.

Stamp also made various television appearances as an expert interviewee: in 1986 he appeared in A Sense of the Past, a 6-part series for schools produced by Yorkshire Television about the relationship between buildings and local history; in 1990 he was interviewed for Design Classics: The Telephone Box, a favourite subject of Stamp's and one he wrote about (he inspired the listing of many telephone kiosks^[8]); in 1995 he appeared as guest expert in an episode of One Foot in the Past about Isambard Kingdom Brunel; and in 2003 he was interviewed by Paul Binski for an episode of Channel 5's Divine Designs which profiled Alexander "Greek" Thomson's St. Vincent Street Free Church in Glasgow.

Personal life

Stamp was married to Alexandra Artley from 1982 until 2007. Their daughter, Cecilia, is a jewellery designer,^[9][10] and their other daughter, Agnes, works for Country Life.^[11][12][13]

He married his second wife, biographer and critic Rosemary Hill, on 10 April 2014.

Stamp was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and underwent a course of chemotherapy in 2017.^[14] He died on 30 December 2017.^[8]

Publications

• Gothic in the Steam Age (2015), London: Aurum. ISBN 978-1-78131-124-0
• Britain's Lost Cities (2007). London: Aurum. ISBN 978-1-84513-264-4
• The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (2006). London: Profile. ISBN 978-1-86197-811-0
• An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott, Jr. (2002). Donington: Shaun Tyas. ISBN 978-1-900289-51-1
• Edwin Lutyens: Country Houses (2001). London: Aurum. ISBN 978-1-85410-763-3
• Personal and Professional Recollections of George Gilbert Scott (1995). Stamford: Paul Watkins. ISBN 978-1-871615-26-5
• (with Phil Sayer) Alexander "Greek" Thomson (1999). London: L. King. ISBN 978-1-85669-161-1
• (with Sam McKinstry) "Greek" Thomson: Neo-Classical Architectural Theory, Buildings and Interiors (1993). Edinburgh University Press. OCLC 80434139
• Telephone Boxes (1989). London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 978-0-7011-3366-5
• The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839–1879 (1984). London: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-80058-2
• Amery, Colin; Richardson, Margaret; Stamp, Gavin (1981). Lutyens: The Work of the English Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. Arts Council of Great Britain. ISBN 9780728703032.
• (with Colin Amery) Victorian Buildings of London, 1837-1887: An Illustrated Guide (1980). London: Architectural Press. ISBN 978-0-85139-500-5
• The Great Perspectivists (1982). London: Trefoil. ISBN 978-0-86294-002-7
• (with Andre Goulancourt) The English House, 1860–1914: the Flowering of English Domestic Architecture (1986). London: Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-13047-4
• Temples of Power: Architecture of Electricity in London (1979). London: Gardners. ISBN 978-0-9502154-9-5
• Britain in the Thirties (1979). London: Architectural Design. ISBN 978-0-8478-5311-3

References

Further reading

• Jack, Ian (7 January 2018). "Gavin Stamp obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 January 2018.
• Powers, Alan (8 January 2018). "Obituary: Gavin Stamp, 1948–2017". Architects' Journal. Retrieved 24 January 2018.
• Waite, Richard; Hurst, Will (2 January 2018). "Tributes pour in for 'elegant and opinionated' Gavin Stamp". Architects' Journal. Retrieved 2 January 2018.