Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Colin St John Wilson, KT, RA

Oration given on 9 July 1998

Chancellor:  the Senate of the University has resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred on Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson.

This morning we salute a leading British architect, Sir Colin St John Wilson - Sandy Wilson.  He had an Essex boyhood.  His father, Henry Wilson, was a left-wing wartime Bishop of Chelmsford.  He attended Felsted School not far away and played good cricket.  He took the short wartime degree from Cambridge and then joined the navy.  He studied architecture and began as a London council housing architect from 1950, while also pursuing private commissions, often from university clients.

Sandy Wilson resembles a number of other leading British architects of the mid-century generation as being a distinctly humane and practical kind of modernist.  One of these others is the architect of this handsome, honest and well-wearing lecture theatre building of 1963 - Jim Cadbury-Brown - who then served as the University’s consultant architect.  He received our honorary degree here some years ago.

This humane practicality is the key to all good architecture, although especially needed when ‘modernist’ design and materials such as concrete and plate glass are the fashion of the day - as we know well at Essex.  It simply insists that architecture must derive from (and speak back to) human needs and experience if it is to avoid a sterile or even an authoritarian character.  As Sandy Wilson wrote in his Architectural Reflections, published six years ago, architecture must belong to “the practical order, always serving an end other than itself”.

Another resemblance with other eminent architects, including Cadbury-Brown, is his having combined practice with teaching architecture.

He is now a grand old man of his profession:  professor emeritus of architecture at Cambridge; a former trustee of both the Tate and the National Galleries and former chair of the Arts Council’s architecture unit.  He was knighted earlier this year.  Forty-eight years after he began his career he must surely have long since begun a contented retirement?  Well, no - he is a special case.  For he is the architect of the new British Library beside St Pancras station.

In one personal respect, however, Sandy Wilson was different:  he was so wrapped up with (and so good at) modern painting - and more traditional portraiture - that he could well have made it his profession.  Instead, he has produced (and prodigiously collected) modern painting and drawing as an intensive hobby.  His twin talent has made him passionate for works of art to be part of new architecture.  When the government, six years ago, followed up its own gross mismanagement of the new British Library’s costs by cancelling any more public funds for art works to be included in the building, his bitter contempt was manifest.  It still is.

Sandy Wilson is unique among British architects this century - and rare when compared to any other century - in having received at the age of forty (in 1962) the first of several overlapping commissions which have jointly occupied him ever since.  These were for, firstly, expanding, and then moving, the Library part of the British Museum.

In essence, successive government policies on the future of the British Museum since about 1962 have been, firstly, to tear down several of its facing streets in Bloomsbury to make room for a huge new British Library building, designed by Sir Leslie Martin and Sandy Wilson; then (secondly) instead to ask Sandy Wilson and partners to expand the British Museum more modestly, exploiting the original building itself in modernist ways (which Sir Norman Foster is now re-creating in his current scheme for the British Museum).

Twelve years into this “nightmare”, as he has called it, of uncertainty and wasted work, Wilson and partners (one of them, M J Long, now his wife) got the commission to build a completely new British Library on the twelve acre site beside George Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras station of 1865.  It was partly opened twenty-three years later (last November) and will be fully occupied by next May.  These incredible delays (and equally mind-boggling overspending) have been, as he says “truly awful”.  He could, at least, recall the eighteenth century philosopher, Edmund Burke, who declared:  “Those who carry out great public schemes must be proof against the worst delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and what is worst of all, the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs.”

But he is now the architect of much the most elaborate British public building of this century.  Its particular sensation is his display of the world’s greatest private library -- the King’s Library, owned by George III and passed to the British Museum on condition the public would see it.  They certainly can.  Imagine six storeys of glazed bronze frame standing at the core of the great new Library building and gently lit from inside.  Thousands of  the King’s beautiful volumes are in their stacks, their rich leather and gilt glowing softly through the bronze-tinted glass.  Users of the Library’s excellent café and restaurant sit next to this wondrous combination of venerable and beautiful books in their stunning modernist showcase.

Together with the public exhibition halls (from the Lindisfarne Bible to Winnie the Pooh, all on display) the sight of the King’s Library towering up towards the building’s soaring white roofs make a visit to the new British Library a new essential London experience.  It is not a place just for people with readers’ tickets, their eyes down onto books (even though their Humanities and Sciences reading rooms are quite magnificent).  Both outside - with its handmade English brick facing and Scandinavian-Dutch influences - and in the airy, elaborate interior, it’s a case of ‘eyes up’ to admire the world’s finest national library building.

After virtually tying with Sir Christopher Wren and the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral for the longest and worst-ever travail in the history of British architecture (thirty-six years as against Wren’s thirty-five), Sandy Wilson is now nearly done with it.  He can enjoy the praise of the rapidly growing numbers who have seen the inside (and may therefore understand the outside) of his Library.  Both he and Wren were Anglican clergymen's sons and so have always fully appreciated the Protestant principle of hard work and deferred gratification.

In the end, and at last, this fine and nobly committed British architect can be gratified indeed.  So can all who appreciate a fine building - particularly when it stores a nation’s history and culture.

Chancellor, I present to you Colin Alexander St John Wilson.