About the Contributors
Ben Campkin is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (IB Tauris, 2013), which received the 2015 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation Book Award and a commendation in the 2013 RIBA President’s Awards for Research. He is co-editor of Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (IB Tauris, 2007/2012), Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (IB Tauris, 2016), Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the series Urban Pamphleteer (2013–). Campkin is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and Director of UCL’s Urban Laboratory.
Irina Davidovici is a post-doctoral researcher at the gta Institute’s Chair for the History of Urban Design in ETH Zurich. Born in Bucharest, she qualified as an architect in London and worked with Caruso St John and Herzog & de Meuron between 1998 and 2002. She completed her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 2008 and until 2012 taught history and theory of architecture at Kingston University. Her research bridges the practice, teaching, and critical interpretation of architecture, and has been published in numerous books and journals including OASE, AA Files and Casabella. Davidovici is the author of Forms of Practice: German-Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 (gta Verlag, 2012), editor of Colquhounery: Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth (AA Publications, 2015) and recipient of the RIBA President’s Research Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis 2009.
Richard Dennis is Emeritus Professor of Geography at UCL, where he has taught courses on ‘Cities and Modernity’ and ‘London: A Geographical Introduction’, and is a major contributor to Ramble London (www.ucl.ac.uk/ramble-london), a series of guided walks through the capital. He is currently researching apartment housing in London and Canadian cities, and public transport in Victorian and Edwardian London. His book, Cities in Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2008), focused on streets, buildings and infrastructure in London, New York and Toronto, 1840–1930. He is on the editorial committee of The London Journal, in which he has also published papers on London’s earliest ‘high-rise’ flats, Queen Anne’s Mansions, and on the early history of the Underground. As an enthusiastic ‘Literary Londoner’ he has written extensively about the novelist George Gissing in late Victorian London. He is preparing a co-edited book on Architectures of Hurry (Routledge, forthcoming).
Peter Guillery is a Senior Research Associate for the Survey of London, the leading reference work on the history and architecture of England’s capital city, now produced from UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture. Since 1986 he has contributed to volumes on Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs, Clerkenwell, Marylebone and, as editor, Woolwich. He is now leading work on Whitechapel, where research is being co-ordinated through a participative website (surveyoflondon.org). His investigation of South Acton came at the end of a spell away from the Survey spent recording threatened buildings across London. He is also the author of The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London (Yale University Press, 2004) and the editor of Built from Below: British Architecture and the Vernacular (Routledge, 2011).
Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England, in 1981. He received a PhD in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London for a thesis on Constructivism and Americanism, published in 2016 as The Chaplin Machine (Pluto Press). He writes regularly for The Architects’ Journal, Architectural Review, Dezeen, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The New Humanist, and is the author of several books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012), A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso, 2012), Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015) and The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016). He also edited and introduced an updated edition of Ian Nairn’s Nairn’s Towns (Notting Hill Editions, 2013), and wrote texts for the exhibition Brutalust: Celebrating Post-War Southampton, at the K6 Gallery, Southampton. He lives in Woolwich.
Tanis Hinchcliffe taught architectural history for many years in the School of Architecture at London’s University of Westminster. She has researched many aspects of the history of architecture and urbanism, especially domestic building in France and England. She has a longstanding interest in the production of suburban developments in Islington, public housing policy and production, and post-war gentrification. She is the author of North Oxford (Yale University Press, 1992) and (with John Bold) Discovering London’s Buildings (Frances Lincoln, 2009), as well as many articles in collections and journals.
Simon Hudspith studied at Newcastle University and won the RIBA Bronze medal as an undergraduate. He then gained a Harkness Fellowship and continued his education at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and at the University of Pennsylvania where he won the Samuel Huckel Architecture Prize. He gained professional experience at the Terry Farrell Partnership, Venturi Rauch & Scott Brown and ORMS, prior to setting up Panter Hudspith Architects in 1988. He was the partner in charge of the Collection in Lincoln, Christ’s Lane in Cambridge, Princesshay in Exeter and Davygate in York, which have won a combined total of 19 awards including three RIBA, three Civic Trust, one AIA and 12 construction awards. Simon also oversaw the completion of one of the blocks in the Athletes’ Village for the 2012 Olympics, and Royal Road, an award winning affordable housing project in Southwark.
David Kroll is Lecturer in Architecture at the University of South Australia and has a background in professional practice, academic teaching and research. Born in Berlin, he qualified and practiced as an architect in London, which became the formative ground for his research passion. During work in architectural practice, he was involved in a number of housing projects including the Athletes’ Village for C.F. Møller Architects. His PhD thesis, completed at the Institute of Historical Research, London, focuses on the history of speculative housing in London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was supervised in collaboration with the Survey of London and shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Research Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis 2015. He held previous lecturing positions at the University of East London, Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Kent. In 2015 he relocated to Australia, where he teaches architecture and researches housing-related topics, exploring historical and theoretical perspectives, as well as contemporary issues and technologies.
Sofie Pelsmakers is a chartered architect and environmental designer with over 15 years’ experience designing, building and teaching sustainable architecture, including deep retrofit. She is co-founder of Architecture for Change, a not-for-profit environmental building organisation, head of research at ECD Architects and lecturer at the Sheffield School of Architecture where she co-leads an MSc in Sustainability. She completed her doctoral research in building energy demand reduction at the UCL Energy Institute, where she investigated the heat loss of pre-1919 un-insulated suspended timber ground floors and heat loss reduction potential of interventions. She is author of The Environmental Design Pocketbook (RIBA Publishing, 2012), which synthesises her practical and academic expertise to support the building industry towards a significant change in its design and building practices. It received commendation for the RIBA President’s Awards for Outstanding Practice Based Research 2012.
Simon Pepper is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Liverpool University. He trained at the AA and wrote his PhD under Joseph Rykwert on Renaissance Italian military architecture. He has worked in private practice, in a housing policy division of the Department of the Environment, and at the British School in Rome, the University of Virginia and the University of Minnesota. His books include Housing Improvement: Goals and Strategy (Lund Humphries, 1971), (with Nicholas Adams) Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth Century Siena (University of Chicago Press, 1986), and (with Alistair Black and Kaye Bagshaw) Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present (Routledge, 2009).
David Roberts is Architectural History and Theory Tutor and Research Ethics Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Alongside his work at UCL, he is part of collaborative art practice Fugitive Images and of architecture collective Involve. He uses poetry and performance to explore the relation between people and place. He has exhibited, lectured and published work related to public housing, architecture, critical methodologies and site-specific practice. His PhD thesis in architectural design, ‘Make Public: Performing public housing in regenerating east London’, explored the history and future of two east London housing estates undergoing regeneration: the Haggerston Estate, a 1935–8 London County Council neo-Georgian perimeter block demolished in 2014; and Balfron Tower, a 1965–7 Brutalist high-rise designed by Ernő Goldfinger facing refurbishment and privatisation in 2016. A version of his chapter for this book has won a RIBA President’s Award for Research 2016.
Andrew Saint works part-time for the Survey of London, of which he was the General Editor between 2006 and 2015. He has written a number of books including Richard Norman Shaw (1976 and 2010), The Image of the Architect (1983), Towards A Social Architecture: The Role of England in Post-War School-Building (1987), and Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry (2007), all published by Yale University Press. Between 1995 and 2006 he was a professor in the Department of Architecture at Cambridge.
Colin Thom is a Senior Research Associate for the Survey of London. A Fine Art graduate of the University of Glasgow, Colin worked in the archive of London Transport Museum before joining the Survey, whose volumes he has contributed to since 1994. He recently edited the landmark 50th volume, Battersea: Houses and Housing (Yale University Press, 2013). He is also the author of Researching London’s Houses: An Archives Guide (Historical Publications, 2005).