Viscount Esher; architect (Good))
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 10/07/2004) Telegraph
The 4th Viscount Esher, the architect and town planner who
died yesterday aged 90, was one of the earliest and most
eloquent champions of urban regeneration in Britain.
In 1966 Esher was commissioned by the Ministry of Housing
and Local Government to undertake a study on preserving the
centre of York. He was warned of some possible hostility
from the council; indeed he was greeted by its leader
saying, in thick Yorkshire tones: "We don't like consultants
here."
But Esher soon won over important allies, including the
Yorkshire Evening Post and Dr Donald Coggan, the Archbishop
of York. He identified the need to bring people back into
the city centre and emphasised the importance of
pedestrianisation and of retaining human scale. His
recommendation that nothing should be built higher than the
clerestory of the Minster has been accepted ever since.
There was a shortage of money at the time, and some of his
ideas were implemented long after the publication of his
report in 1968. For example, his suggestion that a
"rent-down site" near the Minster should be cleared to make
way for houses was finally carried out in the mid-1980s.
From 1947 to 1959 Esher had been the consultant architect
and planner for Hatfield New Town, where he was responsible
for three shopping centres, a church and several housing
projects. He sought higher densities and, in order to
overcome shortages of brick and timber, used an inexpensive
concrete system drawn up by the contractor to Esher's
designs of houses with curved walls and aluminium sheet
roofs.
More than 380 houses were built in this fashion, and they
seemed to be a success until a storm in 1957 blew the roofs
off 50 of them. While it was not the architects' fault and
there were no injuries, Esher's practice suffered
considerably. He later recalled: "Silly ladies meeting me
for the first time still lead off with 'Oh yes, weren't you
once in trouble about roofs blowing off?' It is the only
thing widely known about my architectural career."
Lionel Gordon Baliol Brett was born on July 18 1913, the
eldest son of the third Viscount Esher and an American
mother. One of his aunts, Sylvia, married the Rajah of
Sarawak. Another, Dorothy, a painter - known as "Brett" -
was on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set and a confidante of
D H Lawrence.
Lionel's paternal grandfather was a close friend and adviser
of Edward VII and George V on constitutional and military
matters; he turned down the War Office, the Viceroyalty of
India and the embassy in Paris in order to preserve his
privacy and his powerful position at Court. Young Lionel was
educated at Eton, where he was Captain of School.
In 1932 he won a History scholarship to New College, Oxford,
where he was a pupil of the future Labour minister Richard
Crossman. Edwin Lutyens was among his parents' guests when
he was a child, and Lionel decided early on to become an
architect: "I came from a background which could have led me
into either politics or architecture. Because I happened to
be a visual type I chose architecture."
After a term at the Architectural Association, where he
found that "schoolboy smut and stink bombs set the tone", he
apprenticed himself to A S G Butler. But he was keen to
develop his career beyond country house architecture and
left after two years to become junior partner of William and
Aileen Tatton Brown.
With them he designed a modernist extension to his Aunt
Zena's Queen Anne cottage in Berkshire. He later recalled
that she thought the model they made was a sweet toy, "but
when she saw it full size . . . she had to sack me and get
the builder to put on a tiled roof and Georgianize the
windows". He qualified externally in three years, winning
the Ashpitel prize in 1939 for "the candidate who most
distinguished himself in the final examinations qualifying
for the Associateship".
As a pacifist when war broke out, he joined the fire
service, but the Russian invasion of Finland changed his
views, and he went into the Royal Artillery to serve in
France, the Netherlands and Germany, earning a mention in
dispatches.
After the war Brett resumed his practice in London,
specialising in housing and town planning. He worked as a
consultant for Clough Williams Ellis on the development
plans for Littlehampton in Sussex and Weston-Super-Mare in
Somerset, and with Sir Patrick Abercrombie on Redditch New
Town, Worcestershire.
In the 1950s Esher's practice designed new buildings for
Downside School and St John's and Exeter Colleges in Oxford.
He also worked on the new towns of Stevenage and Basildon,
which he described as "the snuggest and most urban thing we
have done".
The roof-blowing incident at Hatfield was followed by a
rumour that roofs were leaking at Basildon, and then that
water was getting into the roof of his community centre at
Hatfield and ruining the insulation. Though both incidents
were found not to be the fault of the architects, Esher was
surprised by an offer that came soon afterwards to design
the High Commissioner's residence in Lagos.
He was somewhat dismayed to find that his building was to
replace an old Edwardian Flagstaff House and shocked at the
standard of accommodation for the servants, but thought
better than to argue with his hosts. He persuaded the
clients to fill his modernist building with the best of
contemporary British design.
But it was not to the taste of the wife of the first High
Commissioner, and was completed by a new architect. Esher
and his partner Francis Pollen went on to design the Lion
Boys' Club in Hoxton and Worth Priory in Sussex. There
followed a trip to Santiago to advise President Allende on
the planning problems of the Chilean capital, but Allende
cancelled their appointment.
In 1963 Esher redeveloped the Guildhall area of Portsmouth,
which had been heavily damaged in the war. He designed new
civic offices in reflective bronze glass, divided into tall
bays, around the new Guildhall Square. The redevelopment
took 13 years to complete.
Esher was appointed planning consultant to St John's
College, Oxford, for their North Oxford estate and to a
trust for the redevelopment of Iffley, Oxford.
In most cases, he found himself severely restricted by
planning regulations and bureaucracy. Esher was brought in
by the City of Southampton to design a housing project for
20,000 inhabitants between Southampton and Romsey, but a
Labour council was elected which preferred such jobs to be
done "in house" and his designs were abandoned.
Crossman, Labour's Housing Minister, was greatly impressed
by Esher's Landscape in Distress (1965). Before making a
speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, he
consulted Esher, who urged him: "Oh, why not put in a
paragraph about the superiority of publicsector housing to
private-sector housing, because you know, it is superior." A
furious row of the kind immortalised by Yes, Minister ensued
with Crossman's private secretary, who had expunged the
remark from the text. Esher later wrote to say that
architects considered Crossman their best-ever minister.
In 1967 the French government invited Esher to design a New
Town on the east coast of Corsica, for a population of
25,000. He chose a site looking across a lagoon to the
mountains, and was disappointed when the student riots of
1968 led de Gaulle to cancel the project.
As rector of the Royal College of Art from 1971 until 1978,
Esher dealt with a period of student unrest, sparked by a
rise in fees for overseas students and culminating in an
unusually violent student sit-in. He later wrote: "Nervous
of my Etonian, House of Lords image, I thought it wise to
establish liberal credentials"; this earned him a reputation
for fairness. He showed considerable sympathy for the
students, though he found that, among them, "illiteracy,
solemnity and suspicion were now in command".
In 1976 Esher accepted what he termed "another abortive
planning exercise for a doomed head of state"; a commission
from the Shah of Persia to design a western-style university
building.
Esher was president of the Royal Institute of British
Architects (1965-67), a member of the Arts Council
(1972-77), a member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission (1951
to 1969) and chairman of the Oxfordshire branch of the
Council for the Preservation of Rural England.
He lectured in America, India and Australia as well as in
Britain. His publications include The World of Architecture
(1963) and A Broken Wave (1982), an account of the failure
of architecture in post-war Britain. During most of his
career, he ran his practice - which he described as "a
London office in the country" - from the ground floor of
Watlington Park, near Henley, which he restored to its
Georgian proportions.
This led some clients to assume he must be a neo-Georgian
architect and others to doubt his sincerity as a modernist.
In 1966 he handed over Watlington Park to his son
Christopher and designed a tall house nearby, "The Tower",
from the top of which he and his wife could paint
landscapes; he also enjoyed swimming in the moat below.
In his autobiography Our Selves Unknown (1985) he commented:
"Over the years I realised I was a better painter and even
poet than architect."
Lord Esher, who succeeded his father in 1963, married, in
1935, Christian Pike. They had a daughter and five sons, of
whom the eldest Christopher, born in 1936, succeeds to the
viscounty.