Information about the Spence Centenary Exhibition is now available.  Click here for more details.

A research project funded by:
 

This project is examining the work of Sir Basil Spence and his offices in Scotland and England, drawing on the extensive archive of drawings, designs, office papers, press-cuttings and photographs which Spence’s family bequeathed to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland in Edinburgh in 2003.

In 2004 Dr Louise Campbell of the History of Art Department at the University of Warwick was awarded a major research grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a four-year investigation into the life and work of Sir Basil Spence. Her collaborators on the project are Dr Miles Glendinning of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies at Edinburgh College of Art and Jane Thomas of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. They have since recruited three other researchers: Dr Clive Fenton, based at the RCAHMS, Dr David Walker, based at the University of Warwick, and Sarah Walford, also based at Warwick, where she is making a comparative study of the work of Sir Basil Spence and Sir Donald Gibson (Coventry’s first city architect) for her Ph.D., registered in the History of Art Department.

The research team is documenting the work of Spence as architect and designer from the early 1930s until his death in 1976, together with his personal and professional activities. The aim is to provide a wide-ranging and detailed picture of one of the most important and prolific architects active in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. We are making a photographic survey of all Spence’s surviving buildings, and researching the context in which they were commissioned, designed and built. In order to round out the picture which we glean from scrutiny of the project files in the Spence archive at the RCAHMS and other archival sources we are conducting a programme of interviews with Spence’s former associates, assistants and partners. We aim to reconstruct the working practice of each of Spence’s offices in Edinburgh and in London, and to establish the particular roles and responsibilities of their various members. Our research project has three aims: to produce a major book on Sir Basil Spence, to provide research support for the exhibition which the Scottish National Galleries are organizing to mark his centenary in 2007, and to organize an academic conference in 2008 which considers Spence in the broader context of twentieth-century architecture.

Our project parallels a separate archive project at the RCAHMS dedicated to cataloguing and conserving the Spence collection funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund; it is  undertaking a programme of educational workshops centred on Spence’s buildings in 2006-7, to which members of the AHRC Spence research project team are contributing.  

 From left to right -

Miles Glendinning, Louise Campbell, Jane Thomas