Peter Halliday is a writer, photographer and member of the Modernist Society. He’s written several publications and produced a photographic documentary How Grey Was My Valley of the disappearing architectural post-war environment in Wales, recently featured in the Guardian. You should follow this brilliant writer and photographer on IG if you don’t already!

In this fascinating article, Peter transports us back to the 1950s when his Dad worked under Maxwell Fry and Jane Dew at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. But how does tropical modernism, a decade earlier, tie in with the plateglass universities? Read on..

PH: Plenty has been written about the University of Ibadan and its architecture.

Established in the late 1940s as Africa’s first university, it has been variously described as an ‘emblem of modernity’, the ‘crown in the career’ of one of our most influential modernist architects, and wholly inappropriate ‘constructions of whiteness’.

In…