6 C O N T E X T 1 2 8 : M A R C H 2 0 1 3 architectural history and industrial archaeology of London, and was instrumental in forming a conservationbased approach to the regeneration of London’s Docklands in particular. After leaving school, Calvocoressi did a first degree in history and geology at Keele University before going to Newcastle University to study architecture. There he developed a love of the Northumbrian countryside and of its music, and he became interested in historic buildings and industrial archaeology. It was while he was studying at Newcastle that he was recruited to the historic buildings division of the Greater London Council. The division was undergoing a period of expansion to include the making of building preservation orders and directing London borough councils in certain listed building consent cases. With the winding up of the Greater London Council by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1986, the historic buildings division moved to English Heritage. There it formed the core of its London division. Calvocoressi remained there, dispensing his advice and wisdom in his characteristically understated but erudite way, until his retirement. The head of the urban design team at Southwark Council recognised that his knowledge of the London’s historic buildings and places in general, and those of the London Docklands area in particular, would be a great asset to the team and appointed him soon after he left English Heritage. He worked for Southwark for a further five years until he finally retired (again) aged 70. Calvocoressi was an early member of the Association for Studies in the Conservation of Historic Buildings, founded in 1968, and was editor of its newsletter. He was secretary of the Dockland History Survey Committee, which did much to raise the profile of the significant contribution that the docks had made to London’s history. He was an early member of the Greenwich Industrial History Society, for whom he produced an invaluable booklet, Conservation in Docklands, which was a useful adjunct to the volume Dockland: an illustrated historical survey of life and work in East London, that had been produced by the survey committee. Calvocoressi was a quiet, gentle man who shared his scholarship and wisdom willingly with all who came to know him. He engendered great respect and affection with everyone that he dealt with. His role as a mentor to younger colleagues was especially important. Ray Rogers and MalcolmWoods Nicholas Antram, building conservationist and author to conservation as a catalyst for regeneration to English Heritage as historic areas advisor for Kent and East Sussex. Antram’s was one of the voices which urged greater concentration of English Heritage area grants, to the extent that CAP scheme grants of up to £400,000 were distributed for some of the more deserving areas. He became assistant regional director for south London in the English Heritage London regional office in 2001. Here his common sense and ability to avoid the soft option came to the fore, both in his handling of the conservation case at the Shard inquiry (he was thanked by the inspector for the way he had conducted English Heritage’s case), and in his common sense in balancing the case for and against the retention of the orchestra canopy during the re-fit of the Festival Hall. Antram was not an obvious organisation man. He left English Heritage in 2005 to become an independent consultant and a part-time planning inspector, an activity which suited his questing mind. Very much to his taste was employment surveying the churches of various Roman Catholic dioceses and a return to work on the Buildings of England.We shared an area in the English Heritage south east team, so when he began to revise the Buildings of England volume for Sussex with East Sussex, it was natural that we should collaborate on a city guide for Brighton and Hove. His forensic mind was perfect for this sort of work, pushing at the boundaries of the architectures which the Buildings of England should cover and never taking established opinion for granted. He excelled in disentangling misunderstood areas of Brighton’s architectural history, such as the numbers of unstudied architectural firms of the later 19th and early 20th centuries which give central Brighton so much of its character, and which have been ignored in favour of its Regency glories. The main task was the hard grind of revision of the rest of East Sussex, one of the more eccentric of the early Pevsner volumes, which needed a complete rewrite. This he relished too as the romantic which he always remained, working on the architectural history of a county and country which he loved. He lived to see completion of the text. This volume, to be published this spring, will be his memorial, in architectural history at least. Richard Morrice Nick Antram (1957–2012) had one of the most varied careers in architectural history and conservation. It began in 1980 at the RIBA Heinz Drawing Collection. He had been recommended for the post by his tutor at the University of East Anglia, Stefan Muthesius. This job was a stop gap, which also saw him take on the revision of the Lincolnshire volume of the Buildings of England, work to which he would return much later. He turned more towards conservation by joining the Department of the Environment Accelerated Re-Survey of the lists of buildings of special architectural and historic interest. He became one of the re-survey fieldworkers in Derbyshire in 1982. When that was more or less complete, he went to work with the National Trust in Derbyshire at Clumber Park, working on the conservation and display of houses like Kedleston and Calke Abbey. His move into building conservation was complete when he took up the post of conservation officer at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in 1989, where he became a qualified planner. In 1994 he took his approach
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