My father, Lewis Braithwaite, who has died aged 87, was influential in the 1970s and 80s in town planning, saving historic buildings and street patterns, and in considering canals as urban assets. Many of his ideas are taken for granted now, but were radical at the time.
Lewis wrote three books for A&C Black. The first, Canals in Towns (1976), argued that cities should embrace their canals, and advocated new flats and warehouse conversions facing the canal. The Historic Towns of Britain (1981) and Exploring British Cities (1986) were guidebooks based on the first edition 6in Ordnance Survey maps from 1865 to 1890. He hoped that people would “notice new things, find new alleys and raise their eyes above fascia level”.
Lewis was born in Cambridge, the son of the philosopher RB Braithwaite and Margaret Masterman, founder of the Cambridge Language research unit and co-founder of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. He was a scholar at Winchester college, from 1951 to 1956, and did national service in the Royal Navy. After studying mechanical sciences at King’s College, Cambridge, he joined the Arup group in 1962 as a structural engineer. He became a chartered member of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Living in London in the 60s, he and some friends kept a motorised Cambridge punt on the Regent’s Canal by London Zoo. Their Saturday trips inspired Lewis’s piece in the Times in 1965, Across St Pancras by Punt, in which he described the neglect and dereliction of the canal – “the empty private world”, where commercial traffic had all but vanished. The following year he wrote an article, London’s Own Canal, for Architectural Review. These pieces led to the formation of the Regent’s Canal Group, which campaigned to revitalise the waterway.
For a period in 1965-66 his job took him to a construction project in Canterbury. While based there he wrote a second article for Architectural Review, Canterbury – Historic Town or Write-off? (1967), which attacked a planned destructive road scheme for the city. It sparked a national outcry, the scheme was abandoned and Canterbury’s threatened streets were saved.
At Arup, Lewis met Zette Barron, an architectural model-maker. They married in 1968 and had two daughters and a son. From 1970 to 1986 our family lived in Leamington Spa and then in Yardley, Birmingham. My parents divorced in 1987 and my father married Sally Cox in 1989.
He worked for the University of Birmingham’s extramural department from 1970 and taught hundreds of classes across the Midlands including on canals, British towns and cities, European towns and cities, structures, modern architecture and cathedrals. He was a natural teacher and had a very loyal following.
Lewis considered himself an architect manqué and an anti-planner. He was involved with many planning inquiries and campaigns, helping to save Canterbury’s city walls, Gloucester docks, regency villas in Leamington Spa, buildings in Rugby and to ensure a proposed bypass for Ludlow was built away from the town’s medieval castle.
He is survived by Sally, and by his children, Nicholas, Alice and me, and five grandchildren.
