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British historian Gavin Stamp passes away at 69

History Buff

British historian Gavin Stamp passes away at 69

Gavin Stamp, the English architecture historian, died on December 30, 2017 at 69. His Ph.D dissertation at Cambridge was a re-assessment of the career of George Gilbert Scott and he went on to become the leading spokesperson for British architecture. An architectural activist, he lectured, wrote and issued polemical tracts on preservation and was chairman of the Twentieth Century Society and active in the Victorian Society. An influential proponent for all things British he often appeared as a talking head on television and famously wrote the “Nooks & Corners” architecture criticism column in Private Eye under the pseudonym Piloti.

Stamp was an influential lecturer at many schools in the U.K., especially the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art from 1990 to 2003, where he lived in a restored 1861 classical house designed by Glaswegian Alexander Thompson. Stamp never worried about being out of step with his times and kept fervently focused on the past, particularly on those aspects that were influential to the present or were no longer thought to be of importance. His authored books include: Edwin Lutyens: Country Houses (2001), Telephone Boxes (1989), The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839–1879 (1984), Temples of Power: Architecture of Electricity in London (1979) and lastly, Gothic in the Steam Age (2015).


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