New Monograph- Freetown: An Architectural Gazetteer
Our new monograph on the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone has (finally) been published – open access and you can download it here. It’s a major output stretching to 240 pages across a chunky 250x250mm format and is the third book in our series on sharing the archives of the United Africa Company. The other two books are on Kingsway Stores and The Photocard collection.
Our approach in Freetown was to identify and write brief historical narratives on the city’s development using archival photographs mainly from the Unilever UAC collection, alongside recent photographs. Archival work took place at Unilever, Bodlean Library, UK National Archives, as well as at Fourah Bay in Freetown – and this informed our fieldwork and photography. The approach is a classic ‘before and after’ set of images with descriptions. There isn’t an architectural guide book or detailed study of Freetown and it’s architecture – which is quite shocking considering the quality of the work and the architects involved (including Nickson and Borys; Jame Cubitt; Ronald Ward and many others….)
As well as covering the major buildings in the city we include an extended essay on Fourah Bay College, and a write up on Bonthe at Sherbro that we were fortunate to visit. We’re particularly proud of the Bonthe work – and there is certainly a lot more research to undertake into its history and architecture.
Thank you to Dr Noor Ragaban for designing the book – and to Paul Robinson and Ewan Harrison for co-authoring and undertaking the archival and fieldwork with me. As always we’re super grateful to the archivists and historians at UARM – Unilever Archives and Records Management team led by Claire Tunstall.
Transnational Architecture Group 
Fascinating – can’t wait to dig a bit deeper into this!
For some additional info, Jarrett-Yaskey (like Mahdi) attended the AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture. He was a member of the inaugural cohort, which also included Alan Vaughan-Richards (as well as Denise Scott Brown and Kenneth Frampton, among others). Jarrett-Yaskey had previously studied in the AA’s regular course and graduated with an AA diploma.
Thanks for this fascinating info Fadinggracefullyd5adb98f9 (Patrick) – great to make these connections….
God, I hate WordPress. (Patrick Zamarian, now apparently called ‘fadinggracefullyd5adb98f94’)
Oh dear….
A fascinating publication to which I can add a few incidental details. Some people in Freetown still refer to themselves as ‘Nova Scotians’ and these included my late father-in-law who’s mother’s family were called French and lived in York at the end of the Peninsular. After RJ Oluwole Wright (commonly called Pa Olu-Wright) had retired from the civil service. he set up a partnership with Michael Willis (who had worked with ‘Winky’ Scott in Ghana) and Simon Enthoven (who Pa Olu had known in the Ministry of Works in the 1960s) called Wright Willis Enthoven to bid for the school building component of the First IDA Education Project which they won (very nice buildings and worth looking at when next in Freetown). I joined the practice to work on (or rather rescue) the Second IDA Project by which time Pa Mahdi was the Project Architect who I reported to. Pa Mahdi was an Oku, a Muslim Krio from the east end of Freetown and he died in the late 1980s.
Congratulations again on a fascinating publication.
Nigel Wakeham
Thank you Nigel – really appreciate these details and memories. There’s certainly lots more research to do into Freetown….. I’ll continue to research the people you mention too. We haven’t forgotten about inviting you to our Podcast either. best wishes, iain