Sir Basil Spence: Visionary Architect or Architectural Vandal?

Soon after D-Day, a senior Scottish officer stationed near the Normandy beaches was already thinking about life after the war.

When a fellow officer asked what he planned to do next, Major Basil Spence recalled seeing two beautiful Norman churches destroyed by tanks earlier that day.

He turned to his companion and gave a simple answer: ‘To build a cathedral.’

The ambition might have sounded fanciful from another soldier. But Spence was a trained architect who had established a successful Edinburgh practice well before the outbreak of war, making his response seem remarkably prophetic.

In a cruel twist of fate, the war would eventually give him the chance to realise that dream. In 1940, Luftwaffe bombers almost completely destroyed Coventry’s 14th-century St Michael’s Cathedral.

Spence’s winning design to rebuild Coventry Cathedral from the ruins became his most celebrated work. It was praised as a triumphant blend of continuity and invention, while Spence himself was hailed as a modernist visionary and later knighted.

The success of Coventry brought a flood of commissions in Scotland and overseas. His passionate advocacy of modern architecture even earned him the nickname ‘Saint Basil’.

Yet, apart from Coventry and a small number of other acclaimed buildings, public opinion had turned decisively against his brutalist style by the time he died in 1976.

Sir Basil Spence’s architecture continues to divide opinion 

Coventry Cathedral is the most famous building designed by Sir Basil Spence

The writer Graham Greene famously dismissed his work as ‘monstrous’, while Spence himself once acknowledged that some of his architectural ideas had failed.

Now, half a century after his death, the architect’s name remains capable of provoking fierce debate.

Several of his best-known – or, critics would say, most notorious – buildings have been demolished, just as the original Coventry Cathedral was destroyed. At the same time, efforts are being made to reassess and revive his legacy.

One key example is his landmark 1970s design for the former Scottish Widows headquarters in Edinburgh, recognised by its distinctive interlocking hexagonal modules.

The Category A-listed building stood empty for six years before receiving planning permission for conversion into a vast 385-room hotel. Even that proposed rescue, however, has reopened old arguments – more of which later.

The redevelopment has refocused attention on the contentious, colourful career of the maverick architect who once proclaimed himself ‘the greatest architect in Britain’.

He was certainly among the most discussed. Spence designed more 1960s university buildings than any other architect, including the University of Sussex campus. The Sunday Times described his work as architecture for the ‘nuclear generation’; fittingly, he also designed a nuclear power station.

Demand for his services was high. His projects ranged from Scottish country houses and pavilions for major 1950s exhibitions to the British Embassy in Rome and the executive wing of New Zealand’s parliament, popularly known as the Beehive. Yet in the land of his ancestors, Sir Basil became largely associated with failure. When his unpopular Hutchesontown C tower-block development in Glasgow’s Gorbals was demolished in 1993, the council that had commissioned it four decades earlier turned the event into a spectacular public celebration.

Spence flourished in the immediate post-war years, an era marked by optimism, inexpensive materials, cheap energy and grand ambitions. Architects of his generation were encouraged to think on an enormous scale.

Describing his Le Corbusier-influenced Gorbals scheme, he once said: ‘On Tuesdays, when the washing’s out, it’ll be like a great ship in full sail.’

Gorbals flats designed by Sir Basil in 1963

But serious damp, inadequate maintenance and social isolation produced resentment as visible as laundry flapping from the balconies. Spence was reportedly so dismissive of residents’ complaints that he suggested they try growing peach trees on their balconies.

His dramatic terminal building for the new Glasgow Airport has since been overtaken by modernisation. Even so, the original roof remains visible above the main concourse: a ‘great umbrella of concrete vaults’ that Spence hoped would resemble ‘a gateway to travel’.

His public reputation suffered its biggest blows in the 1970s, when two controversial London buildings came under attack: the cavalry barracks overlooking Hyde Park and an office block facing St James’s Park, later occupied by the Home Office and then the Ministry of Justice.

The critic AA Gill described Knightsbridge Barracks as ‘possibly the ugliest building in London, with the most beautiful view’. Spence, he added, had ‘managed to construct vertical bomb damage out of horizontal bomb damage’.

The 14-storey building at 50 Queen Anne’s Gate, later renamed 102 Petty France, also attracted fierce criticism. Former Labour home secretary Jack Straw compared it with the former KGB headquarters in Moscow. Speaking to a BBC documentary in 2009, he said: ‘We used to call it the Lubyanka. It was like a prison and it had little cells off it. There was a car park which was windswept and litter strewn.

‘You would go up in the ministerial lift – you had your own loo – and with a bit of luck you would never be contaminated by any other form of human life, except in a meeting, and then go down in the lift and leave.’

In a 2004 House of Lords debate, Lord St John of Fawsley was even harsher about Spence’s effect on the capital’s skyline. He said the two buildings gave the architect the unusual distinction of having ‘ruined two parks’.

Some critics believe Spence damaged his own reputation by refusing to follow a single architectural doctrine. Instead, he combined different styles, attempting to balance bold modernism with more familiar forms of design. That flexibility left him vulnerable to attack from every direction, particularly because he was unwilling to treat himself with complete seriousness.

Spence once remembered the thousands of angry letters sent in response to his Coventry Cathedral designs. ‘Eighty per cent of those letters were rude,’ he drawled, ‘and the remaining 20 per cent were very rude.’

Almost as an aside, he added that the letters stopped after the cathedral opened and visitors began walking through it, overwhelmed by what they saw.

How, then, did a man who was once so admired become such a divisive figure?

If Spence’s story is one of a man who eventually fell out of step with society, that feeling of dislocation was present from the beginning of his life.

The Queen with Sir Basil at the University of Sussex 

Although his family came from Orkney, Basil Urwin Spence was born in Bombay on August 13, 1907. He was the first son of Urwin Spence, an assayer at His Majesty’s Royal Mint in Bombay, and his wife, Daisy.

At 12, he was sent to George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, a city he had never visited. ‘Edinburgh is the most beautiful city in the world,’ he later recalled. ‘I heard this first at the age of seven in India.’

His artistic ability became apparent at school. In 1925, he enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art, already certain that he wanted to become an architect.

His determination to win prizes and scholarships was driven by ambition, but also by financial necessity. In a 1965 interview, he described his parents as ‘very poor’; their situation became even more difficult after his father died from the tropical disease sprue in December 1934.

Recognising Spence’s ‘unusual brilliance’, especially his skill as a draughtsman and his exceptional imagination, the college awarded him a £40 maintenance bursary so he could continue his education.

He could be ‘busy, self-absorbed and impatient’, but his youthful energy, warmth and humour made him a lively presence in college life. He even joined in a prank after a new public toilet beside the Royal Scottish Academy offended local sensibilities: one night, Spence and fellow students covered the building in humorous graffiti.

After graduating, he and fellow student Sir William Kininmonth obtained placements in London with the celebrated architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, designer of The Cenotaph in Whitehall. Spence greatly enjoyed the experience, although he claimed that, with only £10 to his name, he survived on bread and tomato ketchup.

The year brought more than professional experience. Through their shared passion for badminton, Spence met his future wife, Mary Joan Ferris. Known as Joan, she was fiercely loyal, confident in his abilities and protective of him. After he won the Coventry Cathedral competition, she screened the hundreds of letters he received, destroying the abusive ones before he could read them.

Spence described Joan as ‘the reinforcement in the concrete’ of their marriage.

He and Kininmonth later established an Edinburgh practice, designing private homes including Gribloch House in Stirlingshire for the steel magnate John Colville.

In 1933, the pair designed a charming art deco filling station and garage for Southern Motors in Edinburgh’s Causewayside. The building is now occupied by stylish loft apartments, but as a garage it was notorious for being too narrow to fit local cars beside its petrol pumps. Spence’s early career was cut short by the outbreak of war, when he was recruited to the Army’s Camouflage Training and Development Centre.

His knowledge of perspective, scale and the way buildings appeared from the air helped persuade German intelligence that the Allied invasion would take place near Calais rather than Normandy. Among his assignments was the creation of a fake oil terminal at Dover, complete with dummy buildings, vehicles, aircraft and landing craft.

Sir Basil meeting actor Richard Burton at a mock-up of Canterbury Cathedral built at Shepperton Studios for the film Becket 

Spence took part in the D-Day landings and was demobilised in September 1945 after being mentioned in despatches twice. He was preparing to move to the United States to work for its most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, when he unexpectedly won the 1950 competition to rebuild Coventry Cathedral and decided to remain in Britain.

The competition brief required only the tower, spire and two crypt chapels to survive from the shattered cathedral. But when Spence entered the ruins, he was so deeply affected that he decided to preserve as much as possible and construct the new cathedral beside them.

When he was informed by telephone that he had won, Spence was so stunned that the person beside him assumed the news was bad. Opposition remained, however. Coventry City Council even sent a delegation to the Government to argue that the city had more pressing needs.

The cathedral took 12 years to complete and came to represent post-war defiance, renewal and faith in the future. It remains widely admired, as does much of Spence’s work from that period. In 1960, he was knighted and became president of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Spence also left a distinctive mark on Edinburgh, from the Scottish Widows headquarters to the avant-garde Mortonhall Crematorium. Yet attempts to protect his modernist legacy continue to generate controversy – even when the objections come from people seeking to defend his buildings.

Last month, Edinburgh City Council approved plans to convert seven of the Scottish Widows building’s original 12 hexagonal modules into a 385-room hotel.

The council rejected objections from the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland, which criticised the loss of the pioneering interior. The organisation argued that the landscaped, open-plan office concept, known as ‘Bürolandschaft’, was central to the building’s original purpose, particularly given its Category A-listed status. Has the balance of opinion finally shifted?

When Spence died in 1976, RIBA president Eric Lyons delivered a tribute that was both careful and enigmatic. ‘Throughout history the architecture and architects of any period cannot be adequately assessed by their contemporaries,’ he said, ‘but I am certain the stature of this man will be recognised by future generations.’

When that judgement arrives, it may find him once again on a Normandy beach, imagining cathedrals built in concrete and filled with stained glass.