Peter Bird

Peter Bird (1947—2010)

This obituary was first published in The Times on 4 February 2011.

Peter Bird devoted a lifetime to the care of historic buildings, great and small, establishing an unrivalled rapport with the craftsmen he worked with on cathedrals and churches. He served simultaneously as cathedral architect at Exeter, Wells, Winchester and St Davids as well as undertaking extensive work for the Landmark Trust, the National Trust and numerous parish churches. His weeks were spent travelling the country in a car filled with samples of stone, catching up on paperwork at weekends. His other passion was for model railways which filled his garage, loft and other parts of his house.

Born in Birmingham in 1947, he studied at the city’s school of architecture, writing a thesis on his first love, timber-framed buildings, and winning a prized Lethaby Scholarship from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. In 1971 he married Charlotte Maclagan and joined a practice in Cambridge, undertaking work for the National Trust in Wales at Powys Castle and Erddig, from which he returned spellbound, enthralled by a house where nothing had been thrown away, not even the penny farthing bicycle.

Suffering from the early 1970s recession he worked for a while as historic buildings architect to Bath City Council and then set up practice on his own in Somerset, where he was quickly recruited by the architect Martin Caroe to take over the day-to-day running of the great programme of repairs to the west front of Wells Cathedral and its 297 crumbling medieval figure sculptures. Caroe had embarked on a conservative programme of repair, using lime poultices to clean sculpture and stonework guided by Professor Robert Baker.

After the work was finished in 1986 Bird became cathedral architect and would examine the west front in minute detail every three years from a cherry-picker to check the condition of the stone. Bird embarked on careful re-pointing of medieval walls and recently had begun to put lime render back on rubble walls, notably on the Chain Gate spanning the Bath Road. He had also started to render the west cloister, returning surfaces which had been stripped and pointed by Victorians to their medieval texture. His attention had also turned to the fourteenth-century glass of the great East Window, set so high that vandals had never destroyed it, and was conserving glass and doing trials on secondary protective glazing that would not interrupt the lead lines.

Becoming cathedral architect at Exeter in 1990 he progressively repaired and re-leaded the high roofs, during which dendrochronology established the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century date of many timbers. He also implemented big improvements in fire safety, an issue of great concern after the York Minster fire in 1984, dividing the open space inside the nave roof into a series of compartments in which a fire could be contained and fought. His masonry repairs were in carefully selected Devon stones in contrast to earlier unfortunate replacements in Bath stone. Cleaning, followed by lime mortar repairs and shelter-coating, brought out the composition of the elevations — notably the beauty of the complex tracery of Thomas of Witney’s early fourteenth-century nave windows. He also designed sympathetic ramps and handrails for disabled access and replaced the railings around war memorials and statues with sturdy ironwork protecting them from vandalism.

At Winchester he carried out a long careful programme of stone conservation and roof repair, discussing the work every Tuesday with the clerk of works and the craftsmen involved, earning respect for his uncanny ability to match new stone with old and to judge the colour of shelter coats which, however bright or dark they appeared on the scaffold, always looked right from the ground. His most recent work, the Fleury building, was completed on 18 December, tucked into a corner of the north transept and faced in smooth Doulting stone, with restrained slit windows. It provides out of sight storage for the staging and chairs which often clutter cathedrals, as well as hospitality space and toilets.

His careful approach to historic fabric brought many commissions for repairs from the Landmark Trust, including Gurney Manor, Kingswear Castle, Woodspring Priory, Woodsford Castle and Elton House in Bath. For the National Trust he carried out work at Arlington Court, Cotehele, Corfe Castle, Dunster Castle, Dyrham Park, Killerton, Montacute and Stourhead. He also worked at Longleat, Wilton and Brympton d’Evercy. He also had a huge portfolio of churches where he carried out quinquennial inspections, and looked after numerous churches in the Llandaff diocese.

At St Davids he was working, shortly before his death, on the shrine of St David, intending to give it the prominence it deserves by reinstating the lost wooden canopy and painted figures, following an Elizabethan eyewitness account. Earlier he completed the process begun by Sir Gilbert Scott in the 1860s of re-roofing parts of the cathedral complex unroofed in the seventeenth century. In the chapel of the College of Vicars Choral he inserted a mezzanine floor, creating a two-storey restaurant, approached by an elegant steel stair. As always, this showed exceptional sensitivity to the old work, leaving rugged ancient masonry exposed to view, with the new insertions subtly detached. He also carried out a remarkable reconstruction of the vanished medieval cloister, executed in wood on the 1380s stone foundations.

Although, as a conservation architect, Bird was not invited to do the ambitious new refectories at Wells and Winchester, his abilities as a designer of new work were greater than was generally recognised, masked by his sensitive deference to the old. It is a tribute to the value placed on his work that, despite suffering from cancer for the past five years, he remained architect to all four of his cathedrals until his death. He is survived by his wife Charlotte and two sons.