Shepheard, Sir Peter Faulkner

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Shepheard, Sir Peter Faulkner (1913–2002). English architect. A pupil of Reilly at Liverpool, he later worked on the Greater London Plan for Abercrombie, and on the master-plan for the New Town of Stevenage, Herts. (1943–7). He set up in practice (with Derek Lawley Bridgwater (1899–1983) and Germanborn Gabriel Epstein (1918– ) ), as architects, landscape-architects, and town-planners. The firm carried out a considerable part of the landscape design for the Festival of Britain (1951), and designed Peking Square in the East End of London, at Poplar (1950–3), and many other schemes. Other works included Scrap-toft Hall, Leicester (1957–60), the master-plan for the University of Lancaster (1964–71), the new quad for Hertford College, Oxford, New Hall, Winchester College, landscaping for London Zoo, and various schemes (all 1960s). Fascinated by nature and ecology, he was mindful of the relationship of a building to its site, and always took care to respect the genius loci. He was one of the first to recognize the problems of high-rise housing in the 1950s, and stressed the necessity of creating high-den-sity medium-rise developments: unlike many of his contemporaries, he refused to ape buildings by, e.g., Gropius and Corbusier, and avoided rhetoric and obfuscatory theorizing. One of his happiest works was the restoration of the garden at Charleston, near Lewes, Sussex (1980s).

Bibliography

Downs (ed.) (2004);
The Times (15 Apr 2002), 38;
personal knowledge