Gimme shelter… how social housing in stormy Shetland was transformed by a modernist fleeing 60s London

Gimme shelter… how social housing in stormy Shetland was transformed by a modernist fleeing 60s London

The architect Richard Gibson, a contemporary of Richard Rogers, left forward-thinking Camden council in 1969 for the UK’s northernmost isles. There, he says, he refined his ideas about well-made homes for all, in work that feels newly relevant

Richard Gibson and I turn up unannounced at a primary school in Hamnavoe, Shetland – a light, airy, steel-framed structure of repeating shallow-pitched roofs designed by him more than 40 years ago. We are enthusiastically welcomed by the headteacher, Helen Robertson, who is delighted by the generous, sociable area he formed between the classrooms. Each also opens on to a semicircular external enclosure which, along with a series of little porches, provides shelter from the north Atlantic weather. It is the creation of an architect for whom his profession “is not about designing icons but making a framework for people to live their lives”.

Gibson, now aged 89, has for decades kept the ideals of public architecture alive. In the 1960s he worked for the London Borough of Camden, then a leader in the design of social housing, feeling like others of his generation that such work was the best possible use of his skills. When that idea fell away elsewhere, discouraged by Margaret Thatcher’s suppression of council-built homes, he kept at it.

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