RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

This article (the result of a Paul Mellon Library and Archives Fellowship) offers the first sustained archival study of the British architectural historian Gavin Stamp (1948–2017), arguably the best-known British architectural historian of his generation, and reinterprets his wider historiographical significance, repositioning him as a central yet critically underexamined figure in late twentieth-century architectural culture. He was also a formidable conservation campaigner, active for decades through statutory amenity societies including the Victorian Society and the Thirties Society (later the Twentieth Century Society). The article argues that Stamp's career exemplifies a broader, under-theorised tradition within architectural history — the activist-scholar — proposed here as a framework for analysing figures who move across scholarly, journalistic, institutional, and voluntary platforms.

Stamp's preoccupations were wide-ranging. He was fascinated by the Scott dynasty of Gothic Revival architects, and in particular by Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of the K2 telephone box and of the monumental power stations at Battersea and Bankside. He wrote extensively on the architecture of British India, though largely untroubled by a postcolonial critical framework. He had a fondness for overlooked "rogue" Victorian architects outside the canon. And he was drawn to a cast of activists and reformers, from Elsy Borders, the campaigner who led a 1930s mortgage strike against shoddy housing construction during the interwar building boom, to the Anti-Ugly Action group, which emerged out of the Royal College of Art's stained glass department in the late 1950s. A spirit of anti-uglification pervades Stamp's own work across his career.

Through biographical analysis spanning the late 1960s to the early twenty-first century, the article traces how Stamp's outlook and public interventions were shaped by, and helped shape, the British New Right — a formation that mattered to architectural criticism, conservation, and practice, but one that architectural historians, more at ease telling their field's leftist stories, have rarely examined closely on its own terms. Stamp called himself a reactionary; his actual sympathies and allegiances were more mixed.

The research is grounded in extensive archival investigation, mobilised to map networks and institutional milieux and to reconstruct the wider ecology of Stamp's career.

Central to the article is Stamp's role as a public intellectual, operating across newspapers, magazines, broadcasts, exhibitions, campaigns, and lectures. Alongside his writing, Stamp was also a keen graphic designer and model-maker; as a schoolboy at Dulwich College, he built an elaborate cardboard model of a Victorian train with articulated carriages, one of several instances of him thinking through the past by making things, not only writing about them. Integrating scholarship with correspondence, journalism, oral testimony, and anecdotal material, the article recovers atmosphere and disposition as historically operative forces, showing how post-war architectural history was shaped through tone, loyalty, affinity, humour, and exclusion.