Alan Clawley- a tribute by Joe Holyoak, architect and urban designer

Alan Clawley, 4 December 1943-30 April 2018.

We are very grateful to Joe Holyoak, architect and urban designer, for allowing us to publish the obituary he wrote for Alan, that was published last week in the Birmingham Post.

Alan Clawley, who has died from cancer at the age of 74, was an environmental and social activist and campaigner who spent the last 43 years of his life dedicated to various causes in Birmingham. Alan was an architect, educated at the Architectural Association in London, although he did not pursue conventional architectural practice after 1973. He graduated from the AA in 1969, and the route that his professional allegiances and activities took is typical of his generation.

1969 was the high point of orthodox modernism in architecture and planning – the idea that we could build the world anew, rejecting the past and starting boldly from scratch. But it was also the point at which the consensus on modernism began to crack apart, and from which alternative philosophies were developed, leading to very different and more diverse forms of practice in the 1970s. The path that Alan chose reflected this shift in culture.

After graduation, an enthusiastic modernist, Alan worked first for Runcorn New Town Corporation, on a housing scheme of 2,000 concrete dwellings, and then for the Greater London Council, on expanded towns in the southeast and east Anglia. He became disillusioned by the realisation that he was designing new dwellings for thousands of people whom he never met, and about whom he knew nothing. This mechanistic mass production of buildings, in which the occupants played no part, was replaced for Alan by the practices of community architecture and planning, in which the inhabitants are engaged in the process, playing a central and active role.

In Alan’s own words, the terms which defined his life from 1973 onwards were “community, public participation, localness and smallness of scale”; all characteristics absent both from his architectural education and from his employment in Runcorn and London.

One of the forms of practice which replaced large-scale modernist production in the early 70s was the government’s Inner Area Studies, which included a focus on local character, and promoted the improvement of older housing instead of its wholesale clearance and replacement. One of the pioneering studies was based in Small Heath; in 1975 Alan came to Birmingham, joined the team running the study, from the architecture and planning firm Llewellyn-Davies Weeks Forestier-Walker, and continued to live in Small Heath until his death.

The house in which Alan lived with his wife Hazel, whom he married in 1972, was itself illustrative of his social and economic beliefs. The Clawleys joined the Small Heath Park Housing Co-operative, which built a cluster of houses for its members, completed in 1984. They were Green Party members from the same time, regularly standing as candidates in local wards at council elections, including last week’s election, where Alan stood in Bordesley Green.

The community technical aid movement, which flourished during the 70s and 80s, made the professional services of people like architects accessible to sectors of society previously distant from them. In Birmingham the Inner City Partnership Programme funded Community Networks and the Digbeth Trust, for whom Alan acted as community technical aid worker between 1984 and 1992, enabling many community groups to obtain design and development advice.

Alan was born in Liverpool. His parents were Salvation Army officers, and Alan moved several times with them as they were allocated new posts around the country. It is likely that Alan gained much of his social conscience and his inherent asceticism from his upbringing by them. Alan was a quiet and modest man, but fiercely principled, and willing to fight for a cause he believed in.

In recent years he became best-known for his passionate championing, as the secretary of the Friends of the Central Library, which he co-founded, of John Madin’s 1974 building. It is perhaps surprising, on the face of it, that someone dedicated to post-modern modes of community advocacy, and small-scale and local grassroots development, should be so passionate about a monumental piece of modern concrete Brutalism.

But it was in fact all of a piece. Alan admired the Central Library’s rigour, austerity and honesty, as well as its ethical virtues of architecture in public service. As a Green Party activist, he was also opposed to the wasteful destruction of a building which could be reused. Alan was a keen mountain walker, seeking out elevated rocky landscapes, and also greatly attracted by Norman cathedrals. It is perhaps not fanciful to see Alan responding to tough characteristics in Madin’s library that were similar to what he found in those places.

Alan was not afraid to challenge power and authority, and systematically countered the various dubious arguments put forward by the council and developers for the library’s demolition. Through his advocacy he became a great admirer of John Madin, and wrote his biography, published in 2011. He later wrote “Library Story”, the history of the Central Library and its eventual fate (2016). In between he wrote “Batsfords Birmingham Then and Now” (2013).

At his death he had completed the draft of a book on the history of planning and architecture in Birmingham from the 19^th century onwards, and I hope to see this edited and published.

Alan leaves his wife Hazel, their children Jonathan and Alison, and two grandchildren.

Alan Clawley, born 4^th December 1943, died 30^th April 2018.