Giles Worsley, 44; architectural historian & critic
Hyfler/Rosner
The Telegraph
19/01/06
Giles Worsley, who died on Tuesday aged 44, enjoyed a
distinguished career as an architectural historian and
critic, most recently for this newspaper, which he joined as
architectural correspondent in 1998.
A second son, Giles Arthington Worsley was born on March 22
1961. His father, Marcus Worsley, was Conservative MP for
Keighley, and then Chelsea, and heir to a baronetcy. His
mother, Bridget, was the daughter of the first Lord
Clitheroe KCVO, Financial Secretary to the Treasury during
the Second World War. In 1973 Marcus Worsley's father died
and he succeeded to the baronetcy, moving to the family seat
of Hovingham Hall, Yorkshire.
The hall, some 12 miles north of York, is one of the oddest
country houses in England. It was designed in the 1750s by
Sir Thomas Worsley, an accomplished amateur architect whose
obsession with equestrianism is reflected by the fact that
the house's main entrance leads directly into a riding
school, among the grandest Palladian interiors in England.
It was curiosity about his ancestor and his quirky approach
to design that led Giles Worsley to pursue a career as an
architectural historian. He channelled his great love for
the house and his family into his academic career.
Worsley never mentioned Eton much, but he enjoyed himself at
New College, Oxford, where he studied architectural history
under Howard Colvin, and then went to the Courtauld
Institute, where he completed a doctorate on the history of
stables in the United Kingdom. That research formed the
basis of his definitive work on the subject, The British
Stable (2004). He then joined Country Life as an
architectural writer, and succeeded Clive Aslet as the
magazine's architectural editor in 1989.
He loved the description of his job as "the I dined with the
earl" school of architectural history, even if it more often
involved slog in county record offices. Worsley had the
depth of historical knowledge to see that the houses he was
writing about were not, as so many people believed, in
terminal decline, but that sales of houses, land and works
of art simply reflected the ebbs and flows of fortunes in
individual families. This means that what is probably his
best-known book, England's Lost Houses (2002), based on
photographs from the Country Life archive, is not a
sentimental lament but a dispassionate historical record of
change.
Worsley never showed much interest in horses for their own
sake, but one trait that he shared with his equestrian
ancestor, Sir Thomas, as well as a passion for architecture,
was intellectual confidence. At the age of only 34 he
published Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age,
a survey of the period 1600-1800 that was a deliberate
challenge to one of the most celebrated of all books of
architectural history, Sir John Summerson's magisterial
Architecture in Britain 1530-1830, which was first published
in 1953 and has formed a basis for all work on the subject
ever since.
Summerson had presented the history of British architecture
as a grand succession of styles: Stuart, Baroque,
Palladianism and Neo-Classicism; buildings and architects
were judged by how well they embodied the characteristics of
those styles.
Worsley turned all that on its head, by starting with
architects and working back to style. He argued that
Summerson's stylistic labels were too rigid: most architects
of the period in which Worsley dealt had been
neo-classicists of some sort, and many had been Palladians.
In other words, style was pluralistic, and a matter of
individual choice rather than the zeitgeist. The book was
received with suspicion by some historians who clearly
believed Worsley was simply too young to have written it,
but after 10 years it is widely accepted as an essential
textbook.
Worsley never had much patience with the minor compromises
that smooth life in a busy office, and so his friends were a
little concerned when, in 1994, he was appointed editor of
Perspectives on Architecture, the magazine of the Prince of
Wales's Institute of Architecture. There was no doubt about
his editorial skills, but there were worries about how well
he would cope with the petty rivalries that characterised
life at St James's Palace or the pitfalls of a fierce public
debate that set classicism against modernism - an issue on
which the Prince was known to hold strong views.
Here Worsley showed his mettle. When he arrived, the
magazine was floundering after a disastrous launch, but he
turned it round editorially, and in the four and a half
years of its existence, he established it as something that
remains unique - a magazine on contemporary architecture
aimed at the general public. Worsley, post-modernist in
everything, was no ideological bigot, and did not believe he
had a special mission to promote classical architecture.
Although the Prince of Wales was at first dismayed to see
articles on "modern" architecture appear in the magazine, he
was eventually reassured by Worsley's professionalism and by
the critical, if not commercial, success of the magazine.
Its closure in 1998 owed much to the wishes of the Prince's
advisers, in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess
of Wales, that he reduce his involvement with such
controversial topics as architecture.
The loss of this job was no set-back to Worsley, who was
immediately snapped up by The Daily Telegraph, to which he
contributed news stories and features on architecture all
over the world until only a few weeks before his death. By
the time he joined the newspaper his life had changed in
other ways, largely thanks to his marriage, in 1996, to the
writer Joanna Pitman, and the birth of their children.
Worsley could occasionally in public display patrician
aloofness, but marriage and fatherhood made clear his
essential gentleness of spirit, with which his close friends
were familiar.
His early death is a tragedy for his young family and his
friends, as well as a major loss for scholarship. It was
characteristic of Worsley that, when his fatal cancer was
diagnosed last spring, he immediately sat down to write more
books. A monograph on Inigo Jones will be published by Yale
University Press later this year and a book on baroque
architecture in England has been left all but finished. In
recent weeks he had expressed a real interest in trying to
interview David Adjaye, an architect he much admired and
felt he had "missed" talking to.
Worsley's work is likely to influence the study of
architectural history in England for some time to come.
Worsley was editor of the Georgian Group's journal from 1991
to 1994 and was senior resident fellow at the Institute of
Historical Research from 2002. His expertise brought him
invitations to serve on many advisory bodies, including the
Royal Fine Art Commission, English Heritage's Buildings and
Areas Advisory Committee and the executive committee of Save
Britain's Heritage.
He was a member of the executive committee of the Georgian
Group and of the Somerset House Trust, and served on the
building committee of the National Gallery trustees and on
the architectural advisory committee of the World Monuments'
Fund of England. He was a Fellow of the Society of
Antiquaries.
Giles Worsley's wife and three daughters survive him.