David Pearce

David Robert Pearce, architect, writer, activist and artist: born Harrow, Middlesex 11 September 1937; died Shrewsbury 12 October 2001.

In the Seventies and Eighties, SAVE Britain's Heritage was by far the most effective and high-profile conservation group in the land. Set up following the "Destruction of the Country House" exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, SAVE used a steady stream of hard-hitting publications and reports on threatened buildings and building types to attract attention to its cause. Consciously manipulating the media in a way then quite foreign to the more established and rather staid amenity societies, SAVE played a major part in raising the public consciousness of conservation issues.

David Pearce was one of SAVE's founders and its first Vice-Chairman; as the person most responsible for publicity and publications he was a key figure in its success. He thought up the name, designed the upper case logo, he wrote text and organised printing and distribution of the hard-hitting reports in his characteristically energetic manner.

Born in Harrow, Middlesex, in 1937, he was an only child from a single parent family and went to school at Haberdashers' Aske's. By his own admission he was a lonely child and at the age of 14 cycled around the coast of England on his own, completing the journey at an impressive average of 100 miles a day.

In 1956 he went to the Architectural Association (AA) in Bedford Square, where he got his first taste of architectural activism by taking part in the anti-ugly campaign mounted in protest at the design of Bracken House, completed in 1959 and designed by Sir Albert Richardson. Students from the Royal College of Art and the AA marched on the building, whose traditional lines were seen as positively old-fashioned.

He qualified in 1963 and worked for the architect John Voelker, a tutor at the AA, carrying out house conversions in Kent before moving to join the National Building Agency, a new governmental organisation created to improve the efficiency and quality of the construction industry.

In 1970 Pearce was appointed Editor of the planning journal Built Environment. The magazine helped to give him both an insight into the mechanisms of the planning process and of publishing. Both were to prove important in his work as an activist in the conservation movement.

With Marcus Binney, he helped to launched SAVE in 1975, seeking to awaken Britain to the continuing loss of interesting and potentially useful buildings. In 10 years SAVE produced some 400 press releases and 100 reports. The work led to changes in legislation, changes of policy in organisations such as British Rail and the CEGB, and influenced the future of such problem buildings as Billingsgate Market, Battersea Power Station, Barlaston Hall, Staffordshire, and Central Station, Manchester.

Pearce was closely involved in the SAVE Mentmore for the Nation booklet of 1977 which campaigned to stop the dispersal of the furniture and fittings from Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire. Although the campaign failed, it led to the setting up of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and illustrated the growing effectiveness of the SAVE lobby. As Pearce later wrote,

Everyone was taken aback by the general outcry about the dispersal of French furniture and porcelain, some good paintings, and a lot of indifferent ones, in a 19th-century Elizabethan-style pile.

In 1978 Pearce was appointed Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (Spab), founded by William Morris in 1877 and the world's oldest conservation group. The previous incumbent had been in post for 37 years and Pearce delighted in the task of bringing the society into line with post-SAVE thinking on environmental campaigning. Gentlemanly behind-the-scenes methods were a thing of the past.

He moved the society to its current headquarters in Spitalfields, he started the Spab News for which he typically designed, sold advertising, handled paper buying, print and distribution. He was also the editor. He re-launched Spab as a campaigning organisation with a Barns Campaign which argued that barns should be not only be preserved in new uses but should be appropriately repaired. One of its successes was the reconstruction of Grange Barn, at Coggeshall in Essex, one of the oldest timber-framed structures in Europe. In 1982 he made legal history by taking out a successful private prosecution against the owners of Denton Almshouses in Northamptonshire which had been demolished without consent.

He resigned from Spab in 1983, feeling that he was spending too much time managing and not enough campaigning, to concentrate on writing. He spent a short, somewhat unhappy time as Editor of the RIBA Journal, railing against the commercial management of the magazine who knew less about publishing than he did.

In 1989 David Pearce and I jointly curated the "Conservation Today" exhibition at the Royal Academy. The show subsequently toured the world under the auspices of the British Council to some 46 different venues. Pearce was often sensitive to criticism; when the RA received a mildly critical letter concerning the exhibition, he replied with such vituperation that the shocked respondent threatened to send his response to the press. The accompanying book of the same title provides an invaluable reference to the conservation movement of the Seventies and Eighties.

An accomplished artist, Pearce illustrated and wrote the hugely successful pocket architecture guide Spot the Style (1978) which sold nearly half a million copies, largely through National Trust shops. His book The Great Houses of London (first published as London's Mansions: the palatial houses of the nobility, 1986) has just been republished.

Ten years ago Pearce moved to Shropshire to concentrate on his writing. He elegantly restored an old farmhouse near Bishop's Castle. At his death he was working on a novel that dealt very directly with issues relating to his sexuality. He did not broadcast the fact that he was gay, however he was clearly relieved by the more open attitudes of recent years and was keen that his book, despite its risqué subject matter, should find a mainstream publisher.

Peter Murray