It was entirely characteristic of Gavin Stamp to worry that he had “wasted his time” not writing “proper books”. In fact he produced a substantial and distinguished oeuvre any author should be proud of. As well as definitive monographs on Edwin Lutyens’ Country Houses (2001) and George Gilbert Scott (Gothic for the Steam Age, 2015), he published The Changing Metropolis (1984), Britain’s Lost Cities (2007) and Lost Victorian Britain (2010), which married mesmerising photographs of vanished architectural magnificence to text both erudite and passionately indignant.
Forensically and despairingly, Gavin traced the planning policies, changing sensibilities and insouciant developers that brought about such destruction, sometimes with surprising revelations – pre-war planners did for Coventry’s medieval streets well before the Luftwaffe. I was fortunate enough to be this decent, courteous, unfailingly modest man’s publisher for the last two, and it was pure Gavin again that, whenever Lost Cities’ critical and commercial success came up, his only comment would be: “I do wish I’d had time to do Southampton …”
