Books, poetry and family life North London had once been been a mere art college. Teaching was its main purpose and it struggled at first to establish the research record necessary to qualify as a proper university. A procedure called the ‘Research Assessment Exercise’ was eventually established but it took…

Brighton, Leamington, London Almost immediately after I resigned from the Architects Journal, a vacancy occurred for a part-time but permanent teaching post at Brighton University. I applied and got the job. At first it was just more studio tutoring but the teaching of architectural history had long been neglected in…

Husband, Father, Editor One day near the end of my time with Derek, the London Student Chorale staged a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, with full orchestra, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Such ambitious productions were normal for our choir with its boundlessly ambitious young conductor, Roy Wales. ‘Dynamic’ was the…

London So I journeyed to London with a ten-shilling note in my pocket to pay a flat-sharing agency. With luck, there would be a little spending money left over. The agency man had two suggestions: the engineering apprentices in Finsbury Park or the ‘posh girls’ in Earl’s Court. Naturally, I…

Oxford (Polytechnic) My Oxford digs were in Headington on the east side of the city, a short walk from the Polytechnic. Bob Millerchip kindly gave me a lift from Coventry with my stuff and saw me safely installed. I was renting the tiny third bedroom of a semi-detached house occupied…

False Starts So, work. Maybe a career. What was it to be? My only obvious aptitude was for drawing. Or model-making. Anyway, something creative. But these were hobbies and didn’t seem to qualify as work. I had heard the phrase ‘commercial artist’ but I didn’t know any personally and I…

Kenilworth By about my second year at Grammar School, Dad’s career with Betterwear was producing a decent if not always reliable income, and Mum’s ambition to live in a bigger, posher house was beginning to look realisable. Kenilworth, a genteel town six miles south-east of Coventry, was known to Ken…

Into Town There were two main roads linking our northern suburb to the city centre (we just called it ‘town’). They were almost parallel, roughly equal in length and both were well-served by buses. And yet each is associated in my mind with a different purpose, a different part of…

Family matters All children, if they are lucky, inhabit two worlds: the outside world of street and school, and the inside world of home and family. The relationship between the two is peculiar. They are not merely juxtaposed. Each is the other’s context and together they are the creators of…