Aldington, Craig & Collinge

Peter Aldington started his independent architectural practice in 1962, quickly earning an international reputation for designing small houses that respected their village locations and achieved magical transitions between interior and garden. The group of three houses at Haddenham, Buckinghamshire (1964-68), now listed Grade II*, where Aldington created a well-known garden, is still widely admired and visited, and has been vested in a trust. John Craig became a partner in the practice in 1970 and they went on to design ground-breaking doctors’ group practice surgeries, shops, office interiors and public housing. With the Royal Mail at Hemel Hempstead in the mid 1980s, Aldington, Craig and their younger partner, Paul Collinge, produced their own version of High Tech. It is, however, for their houses, including the Anderton House near Barnstaple, now owned by the Landmark Trust, that the practice remains chiefly associated. Alan Powers, Chairman of the Twentieth Century Society, draws on the recollections of the partners and on contemporary documents to describe the distinctive ideology of Aldington, Craig and Collinge through their built and unbuilt projects. He positions them against the shifting background of modernism in Britain, in which Aldington and Craig played a role as educators and polemicists, calling for better public understanding of the value that architects could bring to every aspect of living and place-making. The narrative casts new light on the continuing work of the practice following the retirement of the two founding partners. This book has been commissioned as part of a series of books on 20th Century Architects by RIBA Publishing, English Heritage and The Twentieth Century Society.