My father, the writer and architectural historian Matthew Hyde, who has died after a stroke aged 68, was the author of several revised Pevsner Buildings of England architectural guides, a culmination of his lifelong love of architecture. Music was another lasting interest; he was a church organist and valued singer in numerous choirs.
Matthew was born in London, son of John Hyde, who worked in the Foreign Office, and the novelist Lavender Lloyd. When his father left them, his mother took Matthew to Kenya, where she had grown up; her father, a British army officer formerly serving in Pakistan, had bought Karen House, the former home of Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, and Matthew spent his first years there. His early memories included hearing his mother tapping at the typewriter.
Returning to the UK in 1956, he attended St Paul’s school, Hammersmith. While studying general science at Bristol University, he met Maria Olive; the two married in 1968. Soon after, with two young children, they moved to Macclesfield and Matthew found work teaching rural studies and biology.
Self-sufficiency years followed, with a goat, chickens, and a Landrover in which Matthew once transported an entire gothic window scavenged from a demolished church in Manchester (it became a garden folly). The family appeared on Granada TV’s House for the Future (1974) about an early eco-build conversion; the introductory shot of our pre-insulation home was Matthew playing the piano with a draft howling up his bell-bottom trousers.
When Parrs Wood Rural Studies Centre in Manchester closed due to 1980s cuts, Matthew took redundancy and completed an MA in architectural history at Keele University.
He lectured and taught part-time in Manchester museums and galleries, and wrote books on local history and architecture including The Villas of Alderley Edge (1999), Lindow and the Bog Warriors (2002), with Christine Pemberton, and an early work of psychogeography Around the M60: Manchester’s Orbital Motorway (2004), with Aidan O’Rourke and Peter Portland.
He made the leap to full-time writing with the revised Pevsner architectural guides for Yale University Press. Matthew is joint author for Lancashire: Manchester and the South-East (2004) and Cheshire (2011); and author of Cumbria (2010), which was praised for its idiosyncratic style which brought the buildings alive. Arts and Crafts Houses in the Lake District (2014), with Esme Whittaker and Val Corbett, won the Bookends prize for arts and literature at the Lakeland book of the year awards 2015.
Copies of his last book, Britain’s Lost Churches, arrived a week after he died. A lament to a vanishing heritage and an exploration of the surprising new uses found for churches, it reflects Matthew’s curiosity and sense of story-telling, and his deep love for the creators and architecture of these buildings, lost, abandoned, rebuilt or reborn.
He is survived by Maria, three children, Joseph, Alice and me, and two grandchildren.
