Gordon Michell OBE 1923-2009

Gordon michell will be remembered best for his work in the field of urban regeneration for which he was appointed
OBE in 1985, but during his long and distinguished professional career he played an important role in a number of
influential projects.
After war service in Normandy, Germany and the Middle East, Michell returned to the Architectural Association and
graduated in 1948 with an honours diploma. Scholarships enabled him to travel in Europe and the USA, studying
townscapes, historic buildings and the architecture of road transport. He and his wife Eleanor set up their
architectural practice, Michell and Partners, in 1954. His work included innovative bank design, housing (notably in
Cirencester) and urban landscaping but Michell was also drawn to the wider environment. In 1962 he was asked
to join Colin Buchanan’s study group resulting in the production of the ground-breaking ‘Traffic in Towns’. He was
thus a party to the appropriation of the word ‘environment’ from biologists, to the invention of the ‘environmental
area’ and so to its present use. It was also as a partner of Colin Buchanan that he was responsible for the Bath
Conservation study, one of the suites of city conservation studies which helped establish urban conservation as a
mainstream planning discipline.
He became consultant architect to the Civic Trust in 1973, and was architectural advisor to the newly established
Architectural Heritage Fund, the David Knightly Charitable Trust and the huge group of ‘Non-outstanding
Conservation Areas’. In those roles he became the friend, supporter and advisor of numerous amenity societies
and building preservation trusts up and down the country.
While with the Civic Trust, he set up and led the award-winning Wirksworth Project. Michell identified the small
Derbyshire market town of Wirksworth as a suitable subject for an experimental project funded by the Sainsbury
family’s Monument Trust. Simon Sainsbury wanted to see if community-led conservation could be used as an
engine for urban regeneration. This is now commonplace but in 1977 it was a ground-breaking concept. It was his
great humanity as well as his professional skills which led to the project’s success, described by Prince Charles as
‘brilliantly innovative’. It won the 1982 Europa Nostra Medal for architectural conservation and the 1984 Royal
Town Planning Institute Award for Planning Achievement.
Michell was a most gentle man, but a perfectionist with a core of steel. All who knew and worked with him came
under his spell. He was totally dedicated to any task in hand and anyone working with him could be pretty sure
that if the telephone rang at 11.30 at night he would be at the other end, oblivious to time.
Michell had a very good eye and used his talent with impressive results in the field of photography. His work dealt
with buildings in the urban and rural landscape. He devoted increasing amounts of time and energy to black and
white photography as an art form and a major exhibition of his work was held at the Architectural Association in
1995.
The chairman of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, Lord Fawsley (then Norman St John Stevas), commissioned
Michell to write a book to encourage better design of town centres. Design in the High Street, published in 1986,
was illustrated with his own photographs. In 1993 he collaborated with Barry Joyce and Mike Williams in the
production of a picture book: Derbyshire: Detail and Character.
In the later years of his life, Michell suffered from increasingly difficult illnesses. He survived these with stoicism,
part of a life that was still interesting, fun and very much worth living. He died peacefully in hospital after a fall.
He is survived by his wife and partner Eleanor, his daughter, two sons and grand children.