Peter Faulkner Shepheard - Biography

(1913-2002). Born Birkenhead, Cheshire 11 November 1913; architect, Ministry of Supply, Royal Ordnance Factories 1940-43; technical officer, Ministry of Town and Planning 1943-47; Deputy Chief Architect and Planner, Stevenage Development Corporation 1947-48; in private practice 1948-2002; President, Architectural Association 1954-55; President, Institute of Landscape Architects 1965-66; President, RIBA 1969-71; Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania 1959, 1962-71, Dean of Fine Arts 1971-79, Professor of Architecture and Environmental Design 1971-94; CBE 1972; Artistic Adviser, Commonwealth War Graves Commission 1977-2002; Kt 1980; married 1943 Mary Bailey (one son, one daughter); died London 11 April 2002. Son of a Liverpool architect. Illustrated books in the King Penguin series, A Book of Ducks (1951) and Woodland Birds (1955). He was due to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, but switched to the Liverpool University School of Architecture under Sir Charles Reilly. His final year design was for 10-storey blocks of flats. He stayed on as a Graduate Scholar in Civic Design before becoming an assistant to Reilly's son-in-law Derek Bridgwater in 1937. During the WWII he worked first on munitions-factory buildings and in 1943 joined his godfather Sir Patrick Abercrombie as part of a team preparing the Greater London Plan. He later in 1945 joined Gordon Stephenson as Deputy Chief Architect and Planner and worked on the design for Stevenage town centre. Shepheard became Derek Bridgwater's partner in 1948. He was joined successively by Gabriel Epstein and Peter Hunter. Bridgwater and Shepheard produced terraced housing on the Lansbury Estate, Poplar, E London, for the 1951 Festival of Britain and in the same year landscaped the downstream site at the South Bank. Other work included the New Hall at Winchester College (1958-60) and Lancaster University (1963). His work at Bishop Otter College at Chichester, built in 1961, appealed to Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner for its "sensitivity in the roof-lines and the enclosure of space" in a style without mannerisms. He also wrote the book 'Modern Gardens' (1953) and designed the restoration of the garden at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex. Shepheard also held an advisory role to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. (Alan Powers, 'Architect with an understanding of people and nature', Shepheard obituary, The Independent, April 20, 2002)

The works of Peter Faulkner Shepheard: