Memoirs Chapter 9

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 the school and the head wanted to put this right. Other tutors, almost all of them ex-practitioners rather than trained academics, were reluctant to commit themselves to a role that would involve a lot of homework, but to me it was an attractive proposition. Thus I stumbled into a job that was to fix the course of my career for the next 30 years: writing and lecturing about architectural history. It was a niche business, but a viable one.

Di and I decided to get divorced. I left the whole thing to her, ably supported as she was by her employers, and said I expected to receive nothing. It went through smoothly and we remained on good terms. I moved to Leamington to live with my old friend Sue, but Di was happy for me to come back and visit her in Holloway once a week. It was a convenient stop-over on my way to Brighton and, more importantly, it meant that I could keep in touch with Jerry. We discovered from parent-teacher evenings that Jerry’s sixth form college attendance had been erratic at best, but he nevertheless managed to pass a couple of A-levels and I encouraged him to apply for university. To my relief, he secured a place studying anthropology at East London. In the meantime, he had plans to travel abroad on his own for the first time and I encouraged this. I should perhaps have been wary of Morocco as a destination, but he duly set off for a couple of weeks’ youth-hostelling and when I picked him up from the airport on his return it was obvious from the stories he told that he had made friends and had a good time. Jerry was clever and literate and when, in his third year at college, I happened to read a couple of his essays, I knew that he could do well. I said I thought he would get an upper-second class honours degree if he completed all the assignments. Leaving nothing to chance, I drove him to college on final submission day and in due course his upper-second was confirmed.

In most respects Sue was the opposite of Di — shy rather than outgoing — but they had at least one peculiarity in common: an aversion, or at least indifference, to children. Anne, Sue’s younger sister, loved children but had none of her own. She was a university administrator but her friends always said should have been a teacher. We have already encountered Anne’s husband, Roger, my irrepressible old work colleague from Coventry, who was now an independent but unqualified architect. On the death of Sue’s mother, Roger and Anne had taken over the family’s large house on the outskirts of Warwick. It was called ‘Oberon’ after the long-odds horse that had provided the money to buy it on a lucky day some decades before. Sue’s Dad, Jim, a lovable character often seen riding his old bike around town, had moved into the converted stable next door. Sue herself lived in her own little terraced house in Leamington a couple of miles away. And then there was Roger’s friend Dave and his partner ‘Lex. He had been a jazz musician and she a travel courier. Roger and Dave were both serious drinkers and our meeting place was a pub called the Simple Simon (it was next door to a pie factory). A middle-aged gay couple completed the group of regulars at the bar. It occurs to me now that the convivial but rather childish character of the Simple Simon crowd might have had something to do with their childlessness.

Roger had turned into a rogue, lovable enough as long as you had no business dealings with him. I found out later that Sue, who was very careful with her modest earnings as a library assistant at Warwick University (it was typical of her she would never describe herself as a ‘librarian’) once lent him a considerable sum of money. He never paid it back and she didn’t insist, not wanting to fall out with her sister — which, of course, Roger knew very well. But he could also be generous and friendly. It was typical of his extravagance that he owned a small yacht which he kept in Dartmouth. Sue and I were occasionally invited to spend a weekend on it. I remember on one trip we were becalmed in the middle of the Channel with a stalled engine and had to be rescued by a passing boat, the skipper of which made no effort to conceal his contempt for Roger’s cocksure incompetence. But we were happy to accept Roger’s hospitality and be part of his colourful, if partly fictional, world. His financial comeuppance was often predicted by his friends but as far as I know he continued to get away with it until his death some years later at a relatively young age.

Sue and I lived in her Leamington house for about a year before we were married in the local Registry Office with a reception in a favourite restaurant. It was a low-key event but attended by a surprisingly large group of old friends. Sue had never travelled much, lacking a reliable companion, but Egypt had been on her wish-list for many years and I was more than willing comply so we booked ourselves onto a package tour that included Cairo, Giza, Luxor and Aswan. This memoir does not indulge in conventional travelogues. Suffice it to say that the trip went well, with no more hitches than usual, and that Sue turned out to be a resilient traveller.

The Egypt holiday emboldened her and when, a couple of years later, I had occasion to visit certain new buildings in Hong Kong and Japan, she decided to come with me and make it into a round-the-world trip, returning via Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. We saw all the sights, as you would expect, including three architectural classics: the Eames House (Charles and Ray Eames), the Farnsworth House (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) and the Robie House (Frank Lloyd Wright). But as usual it is the incidental happenings that linger in the mind. We were staying in Santa Monica but we were keen visit downtown LA. The hotel receptionist told us where we could hire the necessary car but I have always been reluctant to drive on the right (something to do with being left-handed) so I asked about public transport. Well, she said, we could get a cab. But it was a 30-mile round trip and we were stingy Brits. Wasn’t there a bus? A bus!? She didn’t think so. I persisted and she consulted her colleague. There was, it turned out, a bus-stop just round the corner. It was an easy if slow journey, with many stops, travelling along ground-level streets rather than elevated freeways. Our fellow passengers, coming and going in large numbers, were cheerful and friendly. And we didn’t see a single white face.

Years later still, Sue and I were to visit another wish-list destination: the famous ruins at Machu Picchu in Peru. Roy Wales had proposed a choir tour of South America, including concerts in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, with a concert-free holiday in Peru tacked onto the end. I was keen to go but Sue was averse to choir trips so we made a deal: I would do the concert tour but skip the Peru extension, reserving it for a separate package tour with Sue. The choir trip was memorable not for its concerts or its conventional sight-seeing but for those incidental happenings the meaning of which is unclear: crossing the Andes in a bus, for example, and spotting a speck of high-viz colour on a vast snow-covered mountainside. Was it a body? Or that huddled group of youths on Copacabana beach. Were they the thieves we’d been warned about? I found Rio’s vast hillside favelas more impressive than the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer. Machu Picchu, when Sue and I finally got there, was spectacular and beautiful, of course, but it is the big political demonstrations in Cuzco that I remember best. Returning from the famous ruins, we were advised to stay on the coach while the chanting crowd pressed in on all sides. Later we followed the march through the streets and were stirred by a revolutionary spirit.

But all this was yet to come. In the meantime, I was enjoying living in Sue’s house and working in the little spare bedroom. I remember especially the pleasure of compiling eight big albums of slides for my new architectural history lectures. I still have them, unused for years now since digital technology made them redundant. But my journey to work in Brighton was long and I was missing London. Sue was cautious, as ever, and London scared her a little. The North London suburb of Muswell Hill was my proposed solution. It was in effect, I argued, a genteel small town not so different from Leamington or Warwick. We spent a weekend exploring it and Sue seemed to like it. It was the charity shops in the high street that clinched the deal. Charity shops were collectively Sue’s spiritual home and the bargains she found in them were like treasure to her. I was earning a reasonable salary so she could afford to give up her job in the library, which she was more than willing to do. Though well-read herself and good at her job, she had always felt inferior to her university-educated colleagues. We found a flat in a typical Edwardian house right opposite Highgate Wood and Sue immediately established herself as a regular volunteer in the Oxfam shop. She was eventually to become its full-time manager.

I haunted the Wood. It was excellent for winter bird-watching (woodpeckers, nuthatches, treecreepers) and in summer there was cricket on the little green. But we had a noisy neighbour in the flat upstairs and were always on the lookout for somewhere better. The Copse, just half a mile away in Fortis Green Road, was a 1950s three-storey block with deck-access to the upper maisonettes — the kind of modern building that only an architect would find attractive. Most residents of Muswell Hill preferred the Edwardian conversions. But The Copse had concrete floors, which meant better sound insulation, and the vacant three-bed ground floor flat was a bargain. We bought it and lived happily in it for several years.

By this time I had become disillusioned with the choir. Roy Wales, the only conductor I had known, had left for the US to study for a doctorate and would go on to take up a post in Brisbane. The new conductor, David Coleman, was an accomplished musician but lacked the empathy and fellow-feeling that are essential in a teacher of amateurs. He was, for example, openly and tactlessly contemptuous of his more rough-hewn predecessor. The Crouch End Festival Chorus sounds like an ordinary local choir but over the years, under its conductor David Temple, its reputation had grown to the point where it was regularly engaged to sing with famous orchestras. It happened to rehearse not in Crouch End but in Muswell Hill, just up the road from our flat. I dared to apply for an audition and surprisingly I passed (because I was a tenor, of course). David was sympathetic and encouraged (or was it required?) me to take a few lessons from a local singing teacher. She began by urging me to ‘support the sound’. Well, I had heard this expression a thousand times and had never known what it meant. ‘Ah. That’s simple,’ she said. ‘Just imagine that your trousers are falling down and you have to keep them up with by sticking your stomach out. Those are the muscles you need.’ It was a revelation. And there was more. When I strained for high notes she immediately saw the problem. ‘The higher you go, the more you should drop your jaw.’ Another lightbulb moment. Why hadn’t I taken lessons before? From that point on I began to enjoy singing itself rather than just being in a choir. The Chorus, like the Chorale, sang in major London concert halls and was almost as friendly. I was soon welcomed into the group of post-rehearsal pub-goers.

Then Di needed to go into hospital again. Bowel cancer, a common outcome of Crohn’s disease, was suspected. Sue and I discussed it at some length. I said I wanted to help and it might involve regular hospital visits; she, to her credit, said ‘do what you have to do’. University College Hospital, in the old Alfred Waterhouse building, became my almost-daily destination after work for the next few months. Many of Di’s old choir friends visited but Angela Sheahan and Frankie Downing were especially reliable. Cancer was confirmed and rigorous therapy began. Di’s face became swollen and she lost the ability to read, but her mind was otherwise still active and her appetite for life still keen. For example, she loved to go out shopping, with the consent of the nurses. She would bark instructions at me as I pushed her wheelchair from counter to counter in nearby John Lewis or Debenhams, and return clutching bags of trinkets and knick-knacks. The medical treatment seemed to work. She improved and was discharged, which created a new problem. Where would she live? The old house in Holloway was deemed unsuitable. I found a ground floor flat for her in Stamford Hill, not far from the shops, and continued to visit, sometimes contriving to coincide with health visitors. When she began to struggle again, not able to manage easily even the few steps up to her front door, we agreed that she should go into the hospice in Hackney. She was in a remarkably cheerful open ward at first, then in a single room. I left her one Friday evening, promising to visit again tomorrow. In the morning the call came. She had died in the night.

Micha Bandini was head of the Architecture School at North London Polytechnic. It had been Hornsey College of Art, then North London College of Technology; it would eventually become North London University, then London Metropolitan University. Its only famous alumnus is Jeremy Corbyn, who left after a year. Micha invited me to contribute to a one-day conference in her department. I don’t remember the theme. My task was simply to comment on the morning’s proceedings in a short résumé. No preparation was necessary, or possible, so I readily agreed. Easy work. Afterwards, I sat down to lunch with the architectural history teachers, Joe Kerr, Elizabeth McKellar and a loud, wiry, white-haired American called Robert Harbison. My résumé seemed to have gone down well, especially with Robert who said I should come and teach with them. He would have a word with Micha. Here was an opportunity. It was not a prestigious school, but it was preferable to Brighton if only from the point of view of convenience. And with three specialist teachers already in place, architectural history was obviously being taken seriously. It all went through, I was duly appointed to a permanent post, and what would become a 25-year working relationship with Bob Harbison began.

Bob was from Baltimore and never lost so much as a quartertone of his American accent in all the five decades he lived in London. He had studied English Literature at Cornell, specialising in the nineteenth century novel, and had embarked on a career as a university teacher. But he was of the ‘flower power’ generation and some mild scandal, possibly involving drugs (he never told me the full story), prevented him from gaining ‘tenure’. His chances of promotion were therefore limited. He came to London seeking new opportunities and rented a room in Camden town. His landlady, Esther Whitby, was a publisher, working for André Deutsch. They became partners and she encouraged him to write. The result was a book called ‘Eccentric Spaces’, about the imagination’s involvement in spaces of every kind, real and virtual: streets, rooms, gardens, paintings, maps, novels. Bernard Tschumi, a Swiss architect and intellectual, read the book and loved it. He was a teacher at the Architectural Association and invited Bob to give a series of lectures, thus opening a door into architectural education. So Bob was not an architectural historian of the usual kind. He knew nothing about building and was remote from, for example, the English tradition represented by Nikolaus Pevsner, John Summerson and Reyner Banham. But architectural history was a field he could cultivate and from which he could make a living.

Bob and I could hardly have been more different. It wasn’t just a question of background or education, we thought differently. I was a tidy-minded organiser, anxious that the requirements of the job should be adequately fulfilled and that my personal tastes and preferences should not get in the way. What were those tastes and preferences? I hardly knew. ‘What do you really like?’ was a question I always hesitated to answer. It seemed irrelevant to the bigger picture. For Bob, it was the most important question of all. How else could artistic worth be judged honestly? Such an insistence on personal pleasure might have seemed selfish in a person of narrow tastes and interests but in Bob it was kind of generosity because he seemed to love almost everything, or at least everything created with genuine passion. None of the nine books he wrote had any practical purpose beyond the enjoyment of its subject matter. Bob found his inspiration in close physical encounters with objects, buildings and places. He never wrote about anything he hadn’t seen in the flesh. His book ‘Travels in the History of Architecture’ was the nearest he got to the kind of useful round-up that architectural history teachers call a ‘survey’ but unlike most surveys it was based on direct experience of every example.

Years after Bob and I began working together, I had occasion to speak publicly about our intellectual relationship. I summed it up in this way: when approaching a work of art or architecture (or nature, for that matter), Bob would always step forward for a closer look, whereas I would always step back to see the context. When we looked at buildings, we saw different things. Bob saw form and colour, light and shade, scale and character; I saw structure and materials, construction methods and organising principles. But it wasn’t an equal partnership. As I said in the same speech, if we were a double act, I was the straight man. It was Bob who delivered the best lines. I admired him and was always a little surprised that he genuinely liked and respected me. In later years, after his retirement, we would meet regularly for a drink and a chat, always in the same Bloomsbury pub.

Courses in architecture, unlike, say, engineering or medicine, traditionally include substantial chunks of history, usually a dozen or so lectures and seminars in each of the five years of a typical course. So there was a lot of work to do, but both Bob and I enjoyed lecturing and I think the students appreciated our efforts. For most of this time, the ‘lecture theatre’ was a make-shift adaptation of a flat-floored, flexible gathering space known as The Forum. I remember a group of keen first-years who would turn up early for my lectures so as to occupy the front row of stackable chairs, equipping them with improvised note-taking desks. For timetable and cost reasons, discussion seminars were far too large, typically about twenty students each, but we got used to them and developed techniques to involve shy participants. Assessment was by essay plus a ‘slide test’ which was meant to be fun but was taken very seriously by the more conscientious students. Third-years wrote a dissertation on the same scale as my own Gothic Architecture essay at the AA twenty years earlier. Many of the essays we marked would have been judged failures in an Oxbridge English or History course but our students were would-be architects, not would-be scholars, and we made generous allowance. The badly-behaved students who skipped lectures and submitted essays late were sometimes the cleverest. I remember, for example, David Grandorge, who submitted an essay the title of which was something like ‘Who Loves You Babe?’ We were duly irritated, but it turned out to be clever and well-written. David would go on to become an influential teacher in the school.

At some point Bob and I, with our part-time history colleagues, commandeered a big studio and called it simply ‘The History Room’. It was fully equipped with desks, a seminar table, an ancient slide collection and a light-box. Design tutors, most of them part-timers without permanent workstations, were cheerfully envious, dropping in from time to time to catch up with the gossip. Helen Mallinson, who had taken over as head of the school, was a solid supporter of the History Room. It was her idea, borrowed from the AA, that we should organise a series of evening guest-lectures. I then suggested that we should also emulate the AA’s weekly news sheet. We called our version ‘Real Time’. A lecture timetable, plus news, features and gossip were printed on two sides of a single sheet of yellow paper. Bob and I, assisted by a keen student called Jimmy, would spend Friday evenings cobbling it together on the only computer in the department equipped for desktop publishing. It would then be sent off to the University’s central print room and on Monday morning a stack of copies would be placed in Reception. By lunchtime they would all be gone. Bob and I were always amazed and amused by how seriously Real Time was taken by both staff and students. To be tapped on the shoulder at an evening lecture and asked to review it for next week’s issue was considered a great honour.

So the History Room became influential in the local politics of the school, even managing to cause some irritation to Florian Beigel, head of the Architecture Research Unit. ARU, established for many years, was a quasi-independent practice with an international reputation. Florian was a short, round, truculent figure whose nasal German accent was much imitated. Whenever I encountered him, in corridor or coffee bar, he would start an argument implying that we historians were somehow perceiving things wrongly. I remember, for example, one occasion when he challenged me about Heidegger. He had apparently been shocked to hear from one of his students that their History tutor had required them to read an essay by the German philosopher. Didn’t we know that Heidegger was a Nazi? I explained patiently that we were well aware of Heidegger’s links with the Nazi party and naturally we discussed the matter with the students. He would be welcome to join us in the seminar but first he would have to read ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’. He didn’t accept the invitation.

First-year trips abroad became another History Room responsibility. Hitherto, the design tutors had organised an annual trip to Barcelona, which offered plenty of interesting new architecture plus the reliably awesome free-style Gothic of Antoni Gaudi. We history teachers sometimes joined the trip to lend a hand. (The view of Sagrada Familia from Parc Guell was my favourite walking-tour climax.) But there was a problem. Barcelona’s night-life was plentiful and affordable and in the mornings students were too hung over to pay much attention to the teaching. It wasn’t unusual for the odd student to disappear on the first evening and re-appear several days later, just in time to catch the flight home. When the History Room assumed responsibility for trips it was Bob, an experienced traveller, who took the lead. His first idea was Venice, chosen as much for its lack of night life as for its obvious cultural and educational value. The trip went well, largely because of Bob’s itineraries which included brief but authoritative interpretations of all the interesting buildings and works of art. The drawing teacher, artist Rose Nag, joined us, and a plan was worked out so that every student walked all the tours and met all the teachers. I relied on an old formula, familiar to teachers everywhere who don’t really know much about the subject they’re teaching: we were ‘looking and learning together’.

Next year it was Florence, and the next Rome, then back to Venice. We continued on this circuit for seven years. Bob’s itineraries had their eccentricities. Often he would leave out the most famous sights on the basis that the students ‘would see them anyway’. So, in Rome we would by-pass the Pantheon and St Peter’s but spend a whole day exploring the early Christian churches of the Trastevere (plus Bramante’s Tempietto). I saw it as my job to ensure that the less adventurous students did indeed see the major monuments. We stayed in the cheapest hotels, with several students to a room. The mood was convivial and if possible we all ate an evening meal together. There was one particular Roman Trattoria that we favoured, near Termini station. We would occupy two or three ten-person tables and order whatever the waiter recommended. After a wholesome ‘cucina povera’ meal and a few carafes of cheap wine, we would call for the cook, who would appear at the kitchen door and take her bow to tumultuous applause. In Florence, the walk from the Uffizi to San Miniato al Monte via the Ponte Vecchio was a favourite, usually accompanied by a mini-lecture on northern European misunderstandings of the Italian Renaissance. Then the view back to the Duomo in the distance might prompt a brief disquisition on Brunelleschi’s invention of linear perspective, something of hobby-horse of mine.

When my part-time post was upgraded to full-time I became ‘Degree Course Co-ordinator’ — a relatively undemanding managerial function. Interviewing potential students was an additional duty and I also began giving lectures to first year students on building construction. I shared this course with Chi Roberts, a modest but capable woman whose main job was to run the department’s large and well-equipped workshop. Chi had a female partner and was possibly the least ‘motherly’ person I ever knew, more likely to wear a tool belt than a maternity dress. She gave birth nevertheless, and when she brought her child into work she would sometimes leave him in the History Room for half an hour, knowing that I was a rather good child-minder and being quietly amused by the arrangement.

Then Helen Mallinson stepped down as head of school to have a child and Robert Mull was appointed in her place. He was a product of the AA and his special interest was ‘art practice’, a phrase I never fully understood. It seemed to be a redefinition of the practice of architecture that ignored its main purpose. The end-products of art practice were exhibitions, not buildings. In Robert’s view, architectural history was relatively unimportant. The History Room’s responsibilities were curtailed and our evening guest- lectures were replaced by a variety of tedious workshops that I usually sidled out of.

Helen Mallinson then joined us in the History Room. It think it was her idea that we should set up a post-graduate history course, not unlike the Bartlett course from which I had graduated 20 years before. There were three teachers so there were three ‘modules’: Histories, Theories and Interpretations. The plural words were meant to imply that more was on offer than just old-fashioned history and theory. I think Histories was my responsibility, but I’m not absolutely sure. It might have been Theories. From this you will gather that it was a team effort and with a relatively small group of students the course became almost family-like. And like a family we went on annual trips together, taking advantage of Bob’s travel expertise. Among our destinations were Finland, to study the architecture of Alvar Aalto, and Istanbul to study Byzantine churches and Ottoman mosques. Graduates of the course became our successors as teachers in later years, Joseph Kohlmaier, Alex Catina and Hector Arkomanis among them.

Bob had by now been appointed professor, something his wife Esther found amusing. Oxford-educated herself, I think she mainly saw North London as the necessary source of income that allowed Bob to write his books. Bob himself, however, truly cared about his students and was, I think, pleased with his professorship.

The Interview

There was no smile.
He handed me a dirty folded reference
and a small portfolio.
I saw that this would not take long
and probably I’d make an early getaway.
To be polite I asked: Where do you come from?
and noticed bloodshot crescents
hanging from his slanted gaze.
He seemed to weigh my question,
as if he might deny his past,
adopt a different lineage.
The answer, when it came out,
in a high surprising tenor,
was recited like a poem or a prayer:

I am Ugandan.
At my college in Kampala
I attended a rebellious meeting.
When they came we sang our song.
I was too far from the door.
My father bribed them
and they let me go.
But I reported every week
to their headquarters.
They were not satisfied.
He could not pay.
He took me to the airport
and I came to the United Kingdom
asking for political asylum
which was granted.
No word came from home
so I telephoned my uncle.
He said that I should never call again.
He was afraid.
He said my mother was in Kenya.
She had fled.

I waited. Second question: And your father?
But to this, there was no answer.
After he left, I stayed there
in the silent, empty room
to finish paperwork, filled in the form:
Admit / Defer / Reject