Graham Bligh on Pilkington Brothers’ Headquarters

Following on from the last post on Fry and Drew’s staff, here’s an excerpt from a recent interview with the Australian architect Graham Bligh, an employee at Fry, Drew & Partners around the same time as Duncan Horne.

Bligh describes his time working on the headquarters for the glassmakers Pilkington Brothers at St. Helens, Lancashire, designed and built from 1955 to 1965. Designed by Maxwell Fry, the project was run by Staff Architect, Peter Bond. As Bligh recalls:

‘I became entirely focused on the canteen building which is next to the lake … I particularly remember doing a detail of the building wall … coming up to the lake with the waterproofing going down … I had a detail which worked but it wasn’t aesthetically suitable, you know, things didn’t really line up and Peter chews my ear about that. But I said, “But Peter, it’s all under the water!” He says, “I don’t care where it is!” … It’s the integrity of the quality of dimensioning and the detail.’

South façade of the Canteen, Pilkington Brothers’ Headquarters, St. Helens, c. 1965. © Pilkington Brothers

John Macarthur, Robert Riddel and Janina Gosseye interviewed Bligh in connection with the Architectural Practice in Postwar Queensland (1945-75) oral histories project. Visit the project’s website for further interviews with Graham Bligh and other Queensland-based architects.

Do you know these men?!

We are currently compiling a list of architectural and administrative staff employed by the various incarnations of the Fry and Drew partnership, from their pre-marriage work of the 1930s right through to the 1970s. The aim is to include a database in the forthcoming publication.

© Sheffield Hallam University. Duncan Horne Collection, c. 1960.

This image is taken from architect Duncan Horne’s collection of photographs held at Sheffield Hallam University and available to view from their excellent online catalogue, Shimmer.

Horne trained at Liverpool School of Architecture and then worked for Fry and Drew at their offices at 63 Gloucester Place in London. His photograph neatly shows what life was like as a Fry and Drew staff architect around 1960, sat at a drawing board with pipe in hand. The smart chap, far left, is Duncan Horne, according to the Shimmer catalogue – can anyone confirm this?

Fry and Drew had lived and worked at the Georgian terrace since the 1940s, which became an open house for the artistic community at the time. As another former employee Trevor Dannatt commented recently at a docomomo-uk lecture, ‘the Fry’s ran a very hospitable house […] it was a place of great ferment.’

We would be very pleased to hear from anyone who worked for Fry and Drew, or knows of any former employees. Leave a comment or contact us at: jholland@liv.ac.uk

E. Maxwell Fry and Jane B. Drew: Modernism, Collaboration and the Tropics.

Iain Jackson and Jessica Holland are currently working on a Leverhulme-funded research project investigating Fry and Drew’s lengthy architectural careers and the wider cultural significance of their work, from the 1920s to the 1970s. The documentation of their work will highlight their significant collaborations with other architects and artists, including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Denys Lasdun, Victor Pasmore, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

Fry and Drew were pioneers in what is now known as ‘Tropical Architecture’, due to their post-war buildings throughout Africa, from The Gambia to Mauritius, and across Asia, from Iran to Singapore. The project focuses particularly on their extensive work in Ghana, Nigeria and India.

In the UK, Fry and Drew’s often overlooked later projects (1950-70) will also be investigated. While their contemporaries – such as the Smithsons, James Stirling and Denys Lasdun – embraced the changing interpretations of modernism, Fry in particular stuck to the restrained, polite forms that he had promoted in his late ‘thirties work. An examination of Fry and Drew’s increasingly divergent architectural aesthetic will conclude the study.

The project continues through 2013. The findings will be presented in the first monograph of Fry and Drew’s work, published by Ashgate in 2014.