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CFP: III International Congress on Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour 

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April 14, 2025
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, call for papers, Conferences, European Transnational, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Tropical Architecture
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11-13 February 2026
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon​

After questioning Architecture, Cities and Infrastructure (2019) and Architecture, Colonialism and War (2023), the third edition of the Colonial and Post-colonial Landscapes Congress (2026) will intersect the topics of Architecture, Colonialism and Labour.: https://www.archlabour.com/cpcl-2026

Although a common topic in colonial historiography, the influence of large-scale labor on the creation of built environments—including the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure, buildings and landscapes—has not been fully explored in the context of colonial architecture. The topic has significant implications not only for the description of past societies, but especially for the comprehension and support of present-day communities with colonial pasts and their relationship to the production of space. Connecting architecture and labor in these contexts offers a promising avenue for addressing some of the challenges encountered by postcolonial societies. These include the relationship with “Western” construction technologies and materials, scarcity of traditional building systems and their undervalued insights on climate adaptation and sustainable solutions, and persistent racial and gender inequalities in public works labor environments.

This congress welcomes contributions from diverse geographical, disciplinary, and chronological backgrounds to promote a wide and tough-provoking debate, crossing the history of colonial architecture, labour and social history and construction technology.

https://www.archlabour.com/cpcl-2026

New Publication: Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company

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March 25, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Congo, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Ibadan, Lagos, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Our monograph Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company has just been published with Bloomsbury. We’re delighted to finally share our findings with you on the architecture of Western and Central Africa. The work begins with an critique of the archive and the UAC collections, before examining the Royal Niger Company, the development of Burutu and Lagos; the Lever’s concessions in Congo, the timber townships of Samreboi and Sapele; real estate and construction, the Kingsway Stores, and much more.

In addition to the main chapters the monograph includes specially commissioned essays from ‘responders’ as well as a series of photographic essays using previously unpublished images from the superb Unilever archives.

You can read the entire book here – it’s all open access: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350411340

Thank you to Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra, Claire Tunstall, and our excellent responders for all their hard work and contributions.

Symposium CFP: Spaces for Health and Healing in Africa

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March 23, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, call for papers, Conferences, European Transnational, Ghana, Global Architecture, Historiography, Lagos, MENA, Nigeria, North Africa, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, Zanzibar
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Spaces for Health and Healing in Africa

Symposium 16 – 17 April 

Liverpool School of Architecture 

Liverpool School of Architecture, at the University of Liverpool and the Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology of the Johns Hopkins University invite proposals for a hybrid symposium to be held in Liverpool from the 17-18 April 2025.  

Pathology Labs, Korle Bu Hospital, Accra, c1958

We welcome presentations that explore various settings for health and healing, such as shrines, sacred healing huts, and herbal ‘apothecaries’ and other spaces for indigenous medicine and healing practices; ‘basic’ health care infrastructure incorporating dispensaries, clinics, and hospitals  developed for early missionary and colonial medicine; post-independence medical centres. We are also interested in papers examining the use of healthcare ‘vectors’ such as barefoot doctors, travelling midwives and paramedics and their spread of health care practices such as vaccinations, and childhood nutrition programmes in urban and rural areas. 

We are interested in the settings for full range of medical specialisms from paediatrics to psychiatry and also more contemporary physical design responses to contemporary pandemics such as Ebola and Covid. Evidence and records of mixtures of indigenous and western healthcare practices in some community settings and the emergence and involvement of teaching hospitals in healthcare planning is also of interest.  

Other possible topics include the role of military hospitals, colonial and modern, and contemporary healthcare infrastructure and provisions for displaced persons and refugees.  We encourage interdisciplinary approaches–history of medicine, medical anthropology and sociology, oral history, among others. 

Our area of interest is the African continent, from the ‘MEANA’ countries of the maghreb, north of the Sahara, to all countries South of the Kalahari and East and West of the Sahara. Health and healing facilities on islands in proximity to main continental mass such as Zanzibar, Mauritius, Fernando Po and Cape Verde are also of unique interest. 

We are seeking to publish selected outputs from the symposium in a volume currently under negotiation with the publisher. We welcome abstracts (500 words max) and short CVs (1page) Please also indicate whether you intend to deliver your paper in person or online. For more information please contact  Ola Uduku o.uduku@liverpool.ac.uk or Bill Leslie, swleslie@jhu.edu

New Article: “The Paramount Hotel, Freetown: Neocolonial Investment and the Business of Tropical Modernism in Sierra Leone” by Ewan Harrison

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February 9, 2025
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Sierra Leone, transnational, Tropical Architecture
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Full article here https://doi.org/10.4000/1393b

Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown

Abstract:This article examines the planning of the Paramount Hotel in Sierra Leone, completed to the designs of James Cubitt & Partners in 1961, during Sierra Leone’s transition from colonial rule to independence. This paper demonstrates that the hotel was conceived of as a neocolonial instrument planned and funded by the British government’s Colonial Development Corporation to support the continued operation of British capital in a post-imperial world. At the same time, tourist-based development was a central component of economic planning in the immediate post-independence years for Sierra Leone’s political class. This paper therefore reveals that the luxury hotel played a central, if unstable, role in planning for economic futures during the ends of empire in Sierra Leone.

Liverpool School of Architecture: AHUWA Studio Field trip to Ghana 2025

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February 6, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Heritage, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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We’ve just returned from a Liverpool School of Architecture BA3 field trip to Ghana. 17 students from the AHUWA studio visited Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, and Aburi. We’ll be setting a theoretical design project at the former Kingsway Stores site on Accra’s High Street. Students will be using the site to test climatically appropriate design solutions, naturally cooled interiors, and how a new botanical research station, exhibition, and garden could be reimagined in the historic core of Accra.

We visited Jamestown, the Padmore Library, Accra Library, Black Star Square and various streets and buildings around central Accra.

Joe Addo kindly gave us permission to visit his home in Medina, and from there we went to the University of Ghana.

In Kumasi we visited the KNUST campus as well as the Ejisu Besease Shrine – an early 19thC shrine and one of the few surviving Asanti traditional buildings (now all UNESCO heritage sites).

The large new build with the white columns behind the glazing is going to be the new arts and architecture building on campus. It sits at the end of the road axis leading to the library and great hall. It’s not finished yet and we couldn’t visit the interior. From there we went to the Kumasi Cultural Centre to see the Nickson and Borys designed Asanti Regional Library before heading to Adum and central Kumasi. We travelled by bus to from Kumasi to Cape Coast where we visited the Cape Coast castle – with an excellent tour of its disturbing and poignant history. We returned along the coast road back to Accra to continue our buildings visits there and to the Botanical Gardens at Aburi.

We visited the dot atelier new artist studios and gallery spaces designed by Adjaye Associates too. A 3-storey rammed earth building with concrete frame and distinctive saw-tooth roof above the gallery. The clerestory windows set within the roof are north-facing. The vertical circulation has large openings offering views out over the suburb and allowing the sea-breeze to circulate through the building. A metal flashing detail was being retrofitted below the exposed concrete floor and the pisé – the mud was being eroded at that point and required some additional protection. It’s a fascinating structure and clearly an experimental project that requires fine-tuning and testing.

I gave a talk on some of our research and studies of Accra’s heritage structure for the Ghana Institute of Architects and Centre for Architecture and Arts Heritage. Architect David Kojo Derban kindly organised the event – and is pursuing an important mission to preserve, list, and celebrate the heritage structures and spaces within Ghana. David kindly showed us a project he’s been tasked with restoring. It’s the Osu Salem Presbyterian Middle Boys Boarding School – founded by the Basel Mission of Switzerland in 1843. The timber frames, shutters, windows, and verandahs were all pre-fabricated in Germany and then imported. The wattle and daub walls were infilled using local adobe, stones, and plaster. The school is now severely dilapidated and in urgent need of repair. It may not survive the next rain season.

Kingsway: Takoradi store identified

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October 16, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Heritage, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Kingsway: Takoradi store identified

When I was scanning the images for the Kingsway Stores exhibition and recent article, I came across the Takoradi Kingsway in a colour slide. It wasn’t a building I was familiar with and hadn’t seen any other references to it within the wider UAC archive. The design is also different to the other branches – it doesn’t seem to fit with the earlier Millers (old Accra) or F&A Swanzy (Kumasi) stores – nor with the James Lomax-Simpson designs found at neighbouring Sekondi and Cape Coast. The branch at Sekondi complicates things further – why would there be a Kingsway at both Sekondi and Takoradi when they’re so physically close together? The Takoradi branch is also a substantial structure – far larger than might be expected for a town of this scale. Perhaps it was used as a warehouse or depot for the wider enterprise, receiving the imported goods from the neighbouring port that had opened in the 1920s, or was it used as a regional office and retail outlet for the UAC (or one of its predecessors) when the new town and port was set out? The archives include some replanning and refurbishment plans from the 1960s but nothing on the structure’s history and design. The neo-classical facade with ionic columns in antis is also unusual – contrasting with the more moderne 1930s turrets and cantilevered canopies.

Kingsway Takoradi, Ghana: reproduced from an original in the Unilever Archive UAC/1/11/10/1/10, 1958.

I began to look at the maps of Takoradi to try to locate the structure, but couldn’t find anything on this scale – it was only when I reviewed my photos of the town that I found a contemporary image. The building is still standing and largely unaltered. It’s located amongst the other large European trading properties that were built around the customs house, train station and post office. There’s also shipping offices for Palm Line and Elder Dempster, along with a Barclays bank within this commercial cluster.

Former Kingsway Stores, Takoradi, 2022

New Journal Article: “Kingsway leads the way to modern living”: British Profit-seeking and Modernism in Ghana and Nigeria 1920–1970. Journal of Design History

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October 15, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Lagos, Nigeria, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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This article examines the operative uses of modernist design by the Kingsway Stores, an elite department store chain active across West Africa. Kingsway responded to independence by instrumentalizing a particularly modernist domesticity through a series of didactic marketing efforts and the construction of boldly modernist new stores. While it was responding to African demands, this instrumentalization of modernist design was planned and executed as a business survival strategy: modernism is here revealed as complexly imbricated with colonial and neocolonial profit-seeking.

Kingsway Apapa, Lagos, Nigeria, Reproduced from an original image in Unilever Archive, UAC/1/11/10/1/9/1

Harrison, E., Jackson, I., Addo, I. A., & Muraina, O. (2024). “Kingsway leads the way to modern living”: British Profit-seeking and Modernism in Ghana and Nigeria 1920–1970. Journal of Design History, Article epae010. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epae010

New Paper: Stanek Ł. “Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry”

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October 10, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Eastern European, Ghana, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Stanek Ł. Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry. Comparative Studies in Society and History. Published online 2024:1-34. Full paper available here: doi:10.1017/S0010417524000185

Soviet Uzbekistan Today (Through the Republican Press Pages). August. (Tashkent: The Uzbek Society of Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 1963).

This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War.

New Journal Paper: Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa

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October 2, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Ewan Harrison, Rixt Woudstra and Iain Jackson, “Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa”, ABE Journal [Online], 23 | 2024, Online since 01 October 2024, connection on 01 October 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16130

Construction of the Sapele Sawmill, Nigeria, 1946. UAC 2/13/b/7/1, reproduced with permission from an original in the Unilever Archives, UAC 2/13/B/7/1.

In 1943, in the middle of World War II, the British architects Edric Neel (1914-1952), Raglan Squire (1912-2004), and Rodney Thomas (1902-1996) created Arcon (short for Architectural Consultants). Focused on applying factory mass production systems to the building industry, Arcon engaged in an unusual, yet close, partnership with the civil engineering contracting company Taylor Woodrow. While their first project became one of Britain’s most popular post-war “prefabs,” it is little known that in the years thereafter a similar structural steel system was widely marketed in Britain’s West African colonies, where it became one of the most frequently used prefabricated building designs. Through the support of Taylor Woodrow, which acted as the agent for Arcon’s worldwide implementation, the prefabrication system was utilized in a range of contexts: to build houses for British companies, to build schools and market halls for colonial governments, and, of most interest here, to build factories and warehouses for the United Africa Company (UAC), as part of the industrialization drive that accompanied decolonization in the 1950s. The UAC was part of Unilever, and one of the largest conglomerates of trading and manufacturing interests active across “British” West Africa. It entered a partnership with Taylor Woodrow to jointly market the Arcon system, thereby profiting from the erection of its own buildings, and the sale of the Arcon system of construction to colonial and subsequently, post-colonial governments across the region. Today, Arcon structures, often sizeable sheds clad with imported metal sheets or locally available timber, can still be found across Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.

Full open access paper available here: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16130

Who are Godwin and Hopwood? Book Launch at AA, Weds 25 September 1800-2000

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September 19, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ibadan, Nigeria, Tropical Architecture
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Who are Godwin and Hopwood?

Exploring Tropical Architecture in the Age of the Climate Crisis by Ben Tosland with a foreward by Ola Uduku

The first comprehensive monograph about the tropical architecture of Godwin and Hopwood in Nigeria.

After studying at the Architectural Association in London, John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood moved to Nigeria, where they significantly shaped the country’s architectural landscape for more than sixty years.

When Nigeria became independent in 1960 following British dominance since the 19th century, the couple worked to create architecture that was site-specific, modern, and adapted to the climate relevant to Nigeria’s aspirational political and economic policies.

In this richly illustrated monograph, organised by typology, Ben Tosland examines Godwin and Hopwood’s form of tropical modernism and illuminates its contemporary meanings and concluding with its relevance in times of the climate crisis.We are delighted to welcome Carey Godwin alongside the author Ben Tosland and contributor Ola Uduku to the AA Bookshop to celebrate the launch of this new publication. The event will be introduced by Head of AA Archives Edward Bottoms.

The book will be sold at the very special price of £50 (RRP £63)