One of the consequences of attending the memorial event for Mark Brockbank last night is that I re-met my old friend, Bill Neave, with whom we went on holiday in a small village, Acqualoreto near Todi, in the summer of 1977. I had remembered that he was a very good photographer. In fact, I thought that he had studied photography in Brussels. He had kept photographs of the holiday which he has now kindly sent with permission to reproduce them, which I do because they are stills from another era .

There is a photograph of Mark Brockbank as he was before he became a big wheel in the insurance industry:-

I like the picture of us all stuffed into what must have been Bill’s rented Fiat (it’s me looking out of the back window):-

I once had some hair, a lot of it:-

It was so beautiful:-

Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones gave the Inaugural Robert Maxwell Lecture on Monday, a chance to look back on their long careers, particularly during the period before they worked in partnership when they sometimes collaborated, as when they worked for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation in the early 1970s and on the aborted project for a new Northampton Town Hall, but more often separately, which helped to illuminate the differences in their approach to architecture.

Jeremy was probably more disillusioned by the failures of the Modern Movement in the 1970s following the project that they both worked on at Netherfield at Milton Keynes:-

He then treated housing more traditionally at St. Mark’s Road, a key project of the period:-

And he was deeply interested in the materiality of architecture, as demonstrated by the library he did for Darwin College, Cambridge:-

Edward, on the other hand, after a period teaching in Cornell and at the Royal College of Art, was more interested in issues of urban design and in the 1980s went full-blown monumental. I had never looked at his designs for Grand Buildings on the south-west corner of Trafalgar Square. Imagine if it had been built:-

And, of course, he did Mississauga Town Hall:-