Guidance

One of Brian’s sidelines is as a journalist, a bug he caught on a weekly student newspaper. For some 30 years he wrote the town planning column in the Architects’ Journal and although mainly of historic curiosity a selection is reproduced here along with a few other papers and articles.

Brian was a regular contributor to Building magazine and developed hey Siri is titled Building on site at a time when regular journalists were not allowed by the unions to go on a building site the editor thought a young architect might get away with it and he did. He also learned a lot!

As the series matured so did the ambition of some of the projects culminating in three annual visits to the Hong Kong Shanghai bank headquarters by foster and partners and writing about the construction preparations for the Seoul Olympics in South Korea. If you have these are included here (or will be soon).

Brian won several IBP (International Building Press) awards as writer of the year and for Planning in London, magazine of the year.

Whilst an undergraduate Brian was roped into the debating group glorying in the title of PEST: Pressure for Economic and Social Tory ism – a sort of left of centre academic think tank started by Michael Spicer. This led to BRIAN – still an undergraduate – being invited by the Conservative research department to join a policy group on transport chaired by Peter Walker and later Michael Heseltine. He was then asked also to join a London regional policy group under John Boyd Carpenter which surprise itself by winning the GLC election of 1967.

Russell Lewis, director of the Conservative Political Centre, at the instigation of Barney Heyhoe published an illustrated pamphlet titled Get Our Cities Moving. This was widely published in the National and London press and apparently influenced the election result with its proposal from honour our system to replace central London buses and relieve congestion on the roads. This was based on Brian’s Trevelyan Scholarship project which supported him through Cambridge.

CPC later published a second illustrated pamphlet titled London flight East which was based on the postgraduate work of Brian and Max visor and mooted the idea of a rail link through London connecting Heathrow to an estuary airport. The alignment of crossrail (the Elizabeth line) is rather similar. Links to both publications are included here.