In the introduction to his book The Idea of the Architect (1983), Andrew Saint wrote: “We are at present in the midst of a widespread transformation of ‘architectural history’, with its emphasis on aesthetics, design and authorship, into ‘building history’, which has broader social and economic preoccupations.” Continuing this shift was his life’s work, and Saint, who has died of lymphoma aged 78, also inspired and influenced several generations of writers on buildings and their social contexts.
His first book was Richard Norman Shaw (1976), a brilliant monograph on a late Victorian architect – effectively a doctoral thesis, begun while he was a lecturer at Essex University. The years 1850 to 1914 remained his focus and he had a lifelong involvement with the Victorian Society. He completed the book after joining the Greater London council (GLC) in 1974 to work on the long-running Survey of London project. Originated in 1894, the survey researches London buildings by district, and has so far published 55 volumes.
The experience of working on the survey was formative for Saint, who recalled how Francis Sheppard, then its general editor, had recently begun to “treat areas of London in a holistic way, drawing urban development, architecture and social and economic history together”. In the final decade before the GLC was abolished in 1986, Andrew and others from the survey made lasting alliances with members of the council’s historic buildings division, then flexing its muscles to win conservation battles by the quality of its research and advocacy, notably over Covent Garden, which was under threat of redevelopment.
Saint’s research then took a different turn. Admirers of Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, an architect dedicated to public service who died in 1981, were keen to celebrate his memory and that of a like-minded generation. Saint accepted the task of writing up the story, for which the GLC gave him six months’ leave. Knowing individuals such as David and Mary Medd, famous for their role in the Hertfordshire schools building programme, gave Saint an exemplar of interdisciplinary collaboration through the chain from patronage and innovative construction to the grace notes of murals and sculpture. He organised public reminiscence sessions at the Architectural Association in 1984 that reunited many involved in Hertfordshire schools, as well as projects such as the Festival Hall, the Alton estate in Roehampton and the rebuilding of Coventry.
Published in 1986 as Towards a Social Architecture, the resulting book showed how technical and humanist aims were integrated in such projects. A year later came the first listing of a post-1945 building and the instigation of the “30-year rule” that allowed buildings in England to qualify for listing on reaching that age.
Once the GLC was dissolved, its historic buildings division remained under English Heritage. Saint moved across, joining old friends such as Robert Thorne, and new recruits, including Elain Harwood, Roger Bowdler and Steven Brindle, and setting the pace for the team researching threatened buildings. Monday morning team meetings always ended in the pub.
At the start of the 1990s, the minister for the environment, Baroness Blatch, encouraged a more active approach to listing postwar buildings and an innovative study programme was established with an expert committee. Martin Cherry of English Heritage, who directed the research, said that Saint’s “commitment to it was important in providing confidence to senior policymakers that it was worthwhile and had substance: his academic reputation helped, but also his ability to demonstrate that postwar building, particularly housing and schools, was a force for good”. Taking a quote from Auden, A Change of Heart, as a title, Saint wrote the text for a pamphlet that launched the project in public in 1992.
In 1995, he was headhunted for a newly created chair at the University of Cambridge School of Architecture, where he experienced a less congenial working culture. His belief that architects were not as important as they thought themselves was strengthened, and he began work on his longest book, Architect and Engineer – a study in “sibling rivalry”, published in 2007, that sought to understand their different characteristics.
At Cambridge, he struggled to persuade colleagues to publish for the new Research Assessment Exercise, but became a notable supervisor of doctorates, with students including James Campbell and Timothy Brittain-Catlin, who have altered the Cambridge course to become more grounded and practical in ways he desired.
Saint was happy to take voluntary severance from Cambridge in 2006. He returned to the Survey of London as general editor, invigorating the research and publishing programme by completing work already in hand on Clerkenwell and, with colleagues, adding volumes on Woolwich, Battersea and South Marylebone. He personally undertook most of the volume on Oxford Street before stepping down to half time and then, in 2015, to retirement, by which time the survey was being administered by the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL.
Saint continued to be active as an author and editor, with a book on late Victorian London published in 2021, and editorship of the Victorian Society’s journals and its series of monographs. A book on Waterloo Bridge and its Surrey side hinterland awaits posthumous publication.
Born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Andrew was the younger son of Elisabeth (nee Butterfield) and the Rev Arthur Maxwell Saint (known as Max). The family moved to Cheltenham, where Andrew went to Dean Close junior school, and then to Christ’s Hospital school, Horsham. Andrew relished Latin and Greek, singing and playing the cello, while hating sports, and made strong friendships. His interest in architecture came from “church crawling” with his parents, from the Aston Webb buildings of his school, and later from Oxford, where he studied classics. When his father became chaplain of Guy’s hospital, he lived in London for the first time and loved the abandoned feeling of the Southwark riverside.
Taking Oxford entrance a year early, he got an exhibition to Balliol College, and spent time in Italy at the British School at Rome. A master’s degree at the Warburg Institute in London on Ruskin led to his first part-time teaching job in the art department at Essex University.
From the early 1970s until the late 80s, Saint was the partner of Ellen Leopold, an American architect and academic, and they had two daughters, Lily and Catherine. After the relationship ended, Ellen, Lily and Catherine settled in the US, while Saint remained in London, living in a Duchy of Cornwall terrace house in Kennington. He had another daughter, Leonora, from a relationship with Annachiara Cerri. In later life, his partner was the Dutch art historian Ida Jager. He is survived by Ida and his daughters.
• Andrew John Saint, architectural historian, born 30 November 1946; died 16 July 2025
