Gavin Stamp and the Tradition of the Activist-Scholar in Architectural History

This article positions the architectural historian Gavin Stamp (1948--2017) as an exemplar of one of architectural history's underexplored traditions: the activist-scholar. It argues that Stamp's wide-ranging career was a cumulative campaign against what he saw as architectural ignorance and philistinism, resulting in "uglification". Consequently, the hallmark of his work was an emphasis on widening an appreciation of architecture, on bridging professional and public spheres and on strengthening the culture of critique. Contextualising Stamp's contribution involves reuniting his scholarly work in print with his wider activities, evidence for which can be found in an informal and less accessible sphere of reminiscences, journalism, personal communication and ephemera. The article therefore makes recourse to oral history and to Stamp's archive, gifted to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art following his death. It examines Stamp's inventive forms of advocacy, the networks within which he operated, how he mediated his causes across diverse platforms---and to what end. The article shows that, although as a student at Cambridge Stamp subscribed to an anti-modernist disposition as part of a right-leaning coterie, over his career his early certitudes were slowly shaken down and some of his more inveterate hostilities gradually softened.