After returning from Oxford, I looked out my copy of Town and Townscape which I must have bought in Blackwells soon after it appeared in 1968 and first got me to look closely at how cities are constructed. It’s got a period feel – of course – illustrated with black-and-white photographs of streetscapes full of the cars of the 1960s and in some cases much earlier. I hadn’t realised that he had published an earlier book Oxford Observed in 1952 and that, after teaching town planning in Durham, he set up a town planning consultancy in Oxford, annoyed that he hadn’t been made a Professor. He was the person who advocated putting a bypass across Christ Church Meadow and was also the person who first used the idea of townscape as distinct from landscape in a book called The Anatomy of a Village, published in 1946.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
I recently came across plans by Sharp for the gardens at St John’s College, Cambridge. Sylvia Crowe did the planting plan for part of the scheme, and Sharp worked with David Wyn Roberts on the design of a modernist garden shelter. I had not come across his design work before and feel that he is rather undervalued.
Yes, I sense from his obituary in DNB that he may have been rather dogmatic – but interesting. Charles