Gavin Stamp

Gavin Mark Stamp (born 15 March 1948) is a British writer and architectural historian.

Education

Stamp was educated at Dulwich College in South London from 1959 to 1967 as part of the "Dulwich Experiment",^[1] then at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained a PhD degree in 1978 with a thesis entitled George Gilbert Scott, junior, architect; 1839-1897.^[2]

Life and career

After a career of architectural polemic, lecturing and publishing Stamp taught architectural history from 1990, latterly as Professor, at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. He bought and restored the house that Alexander 'Greek' Thompson built for himself in Moray Place, Glasgow. In 2003, he resigned from the school and reverted to being an independent scholar and lecturer. He writes the "Nooks & Corners" architecture criticism column in Private Eye under the pseudonym Piloti ^[3] He regularly contributes essays on architecture to the fine arts and collector's magazine Apollo. Stamp is a long-standing Trustee and former Chairman of the Twentieth Century Society, a registered charity which promotes the appreciation of modern architecture and the conservation of Britain’s architectural heritage.^[4] He has also been active in the Victorian Society in various capacities over five decades.

Television appearances

Stamp has presented a number of programmes about architecture for Channel 5. In 2005 he presented Pevsner’s Cities: Liverpool and Pevsner’s Cities: Newcastle and in 2006 Pevsner's Cities: Oxford;^[5] each programme profiled the cities with reference to the writings of architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. In 2007 he presented a five-part architectural travel series Gavin Stamp’s Orient Express.^[6] Stamp travelled by train along the original Orient Express route, stopping off on the way to look at architecture and to see how the history of Eastern Europe is told in its buildings.

Stamp has also made various television appearances as an expert interviewee: in 1986 he appeared in A Sense of the Past, a 6-part series for schools produced by Yorkshire Television about the relationship between buildings and local history; in 1990 he was interviewed for Design Classics: The Telephone Box, a favourite subject of Stamp's and one he has written about; in 1995 he appeared as guest expert in an episode of One Foot in the Past about Brunel; and in 2003 he was interviewed by Paul Binski for an episode of Channel Five's Divine Designs which profiled Alexander 'Greek' Thomson's St. Vincent Street Free Church in Glasgow.

Personal life

Stamp was married to Alexandra Artley from 1982 until 2007.

Gavin Stamp married biographer and critic Rosemary Hill on 10 April 2014.

References

Publications

• Britain's Lost Cities (2007). London: Aurum. ISBN 978-1-84513-264-4
• The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (2006). London: Profile. ISBN 978-1-86197-811-0
• An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott, Jr. (2002). Donington: Shaun Tyas. ISBN 978-1-900289-51-1
• Edwin Lutyens: Country Houses (2001). London: Aurum. ISBN 978-1-85410-763-3
• Personal and Professional Recollections of George Gilbert Scott (1995). Stamford: Paul Watkins. ISBN 978-1-871615-26-5
• (with Phil Sayer) Alexander "Greek" Thomson (1999). London: L. King. ISBN 978-1-85669-161-1
• (with Sam McKinstry) "Greek" Thomson: Neo-Classical Architectural Theory, Buildings and Interiors (1993). Edinburgh University Press. OCLC 80434139
• Telephone Boxes (1989). London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 978-0-7011-3366-5
• The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839–1879 (1984). London: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-80058-2
• (with Colin Amery) Victorian Buildings of London, 1837-1887: An Illustrated Guide (1980). London: Architectural Press. ISBN 978-0-85139-500-5
• The Great Perspectivists (1982). London: Trefoil. ISBN 978-0-86294-002-7
• (with Andre Goulancourt) The English House, 1860–1914: the Flowering of English Domestic Architecture (1986). London: Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-13047-4
• Temples of Power: Architecture of Electricity in London (1979). London: Gardners. ISBN 978-0-9502154-9-5
• Britain in the Thirties (1979). London: Architectural Design. ISBN 978-0-8478-5311-3
• Gothic in the Steam Age (2015), London: Aurum Press. ISBN 978-1-78131-124-0