The Spectator's Notes | 11 January 2018

Gavin Stamp, who died just before the year’s end, will be mourned by many Spectator readers. For years, particularly in the 1980s, he was the paper’s main voice on architectural questions, notably as they affected the public space. His voice, both angry and compassionate, would be raised whenever he thought someone in authority — in church, state, local government, big business — was damaging what belonged to the people. He was very important at changing official attitudes imbued with fag-end modernism. No one expounded better the conception of a building’s public purpose, so to hear him talk about, say, Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, was revelatory. Gavin made his greatest splash in the paper early in 1985 with his cover piece ‘Telephone boxes: reverse the changes’. This led our vigorous campaign to force the newly privatised British Telecom to stop ripping out all its 76,500 K2 and K6 red telephone boxes, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, perhaps the best pieces of street furniture ever made. At that time, The Spectator had just been bought by the Australian Fairfax group, and I had to placate the dismay of one of the Fairfax executives at the ‘irrelevance’ of it all. In fact, few campaigns have gained such enthusiastic support of readers, or made such a difference, as Gavin’s. BT retreated, and started to save the boxes it should never — in the interest of ‘rebranding’ — have abandoned. In the end, the red box was destroyed by something neither side had foreseen at the time — the all-conquering mobile phone.