It has rightly been pointed out that my post on Jeremy Dixon’s and Edward Jones’s joint lecture last Monday grossly abbreviated their presentations.

What for me came out clearly was that for the first phase of their career, they worked very closely in parallel.  Both trained at the Architectural Association, where both came under the influence of, and made friends with, Bob Maxwell.  They were both members of the so-called ‘Grunt Group’, a pejorative description by Peter Cook which Jeremy particularly dislikes (according to Cook, ‘The grunt of the Grunt Group was ‘a grunt of seriousness and aestheticism (though it had its origins in the actual throatal noise made by some of its members and their generally quiet English manner))’:-

They were both hired by Derek Walker in 1971 to work at Milton Keynes:-

They both (separately) entered the competition for Northampton Town Hall in 1973, which Jeremy won, and then Edward helped with:-

Post-1973, their paths diverged.  There was not much work about, particularly the sort of public projects, including social public housing projects which had been available in the 1960s.  Jeremy worked in partnership with his wife Fenella, initially on smaller-scale housing in west London and then after 1984 on the Royal Opera House after they had been invited by Bill Jack of BDP to enter the competition for the Royal Opera House and won it through a very complex, non-architectural process of competition.  It was a project of large-scale and complex urban design, not helped by the well-mobilised opposition of the local community (the image which was submitted for planning approval is by Carl Laubin):-

Meanwhile, Edward went into teaching (he had a particularly big influence through his teaching in Ireland) and then moved to Canada to work on Mississauga Town Hall before they jointly decided to work together in 1989.

I discovered long ago that it can be invidious to try to separate how they each worked because for the later part of their careers they have worked so closely in partnership that any attempt to differentiate their approach is liable to over-simplification.