Basic Biographical Details | Name: | William Gillespie & Partners (or Gillespies) | | Designation: | | | Born: | 1962 | | Died: | | | Bio Notes: | William Gillespie was born in 1926 in Saddleworth, near Oldham, Yorkshire. His interest in architecture began at an early age; he recalls drawing churches from the age of ten. He attended Colwyn Bay Secondary School, and was apprenticed to J M Porter & Co – architects, valuers and estate agents of Colwyn Bay – from July 1943. He voluntarily interrupted his training just over a year later to serve in the navy, leaving it in 1946. He then tried to obtain a place at Liverpool University to study architecture, but his application was rejected and, with his father’s encouragement, he turned instead to his second love: horticulture.
His first move was to work at plant nurseries (Parley But?) in Woking, Surrey, but he soon tired of struggling to make ends meet in the south-east of England. Asked for advice, his father – then living in Abersoch, North Wales – went to discuss the matter with his bank manager, who suggested he contact a Mr Bodfangruffydd, a market gardener near Coventry. Bodfangruffydd turned out to have experience of landscape architecture and, upon discovering Gillespie’s interest in architecture, put him in touch with Frank Clark, who had very recently set up the first British school of landscape architecture, at Reading. In September 1948 Gillespie was one of just five students to joined Clark’s three-year diploma course in its second year of functioning, the others being Britta Graunosk (Finnish), Geoffrey Smith, Ian Laurie (of Dundee) and Johnny Williams (of Liverpool). Gillespie recalls that Clark ‘used to read to us a lot rather than give lectures. He introduced us to people who had been involved in landscape around the world through his reading. ... When we left Reading, Frank said to all of us, “now you might think I’m a bit of a bumble and when you leave here, you will probably forget most of what you’ve learnt. But in five years’ time, and subsequently, you’ll remember everything.” And he was right.’ Besides Clark, Gillespie studied under Doris Knoll, Laura Baitman and Professor Betts, and he spent the summer vacation of 1949 examining the new town of Stevenage.
On graduating in 1951, he secured a post in the new landscape department set up by planning officer Dick Atkinson within Durham County Council – which he remembers as ‘the only place that was employing landscape architects outside of the new towns and the London County Council’. He was principally occupied with projects involving coal tips, which needed to be adjusted to suit the surrounding topography and to allow a return of the land to agriculture. He was headhunted by Lancashire County Council for similar work, and joined them in July 1953.
Becoming ever more conscious of the fact that landscape work is more closely linked to engineering than to architecture, he decided to seek opportunities that were more related to buildings. He obtained a post in Solihull designing school playgrounds, playing fields and parks, and then, in 1956, secured a position working on the New Town of Cumbernauld. His core team had three or four members of staff, and the then chief architect, Hugh Wilson, entrusted him with not only design and planning tasks but also with setting up an out-of-town nursery and running the direct labour force, who were engaged on landscape and forestry work. When Gillespie and Peter Youngman, the consultant landscape architect, were faced with a difference of opinion, it was agreed that Youngman would landscape the south side of the town and Gillespie the north. Their approaches are visibly different, with the north side conceived to take maximum advantage of the views of the Campsie Fells, and with a specially planted forest to enhance the landscape. Gillespie made use of his experience with pit heaps: he remembered finding heather and birch trees growing at some of the bings he had worked on, and return visits to them enabled his team to obtain substantial quantities of vegetation for re-use at Cumbernauld. Unfortunately his plans for step ramps were abandoned; he cites Dunbartonshire County Council’s replacement of them by footpaths on a one-eighth gradient, which are perilously slippery in winter, as one of the reasons why the town later acquired such a negative reputation. Another blow was the decision by the Scottish Office not to construct the huge crescents of earth, one at each end of the town centre, that he and Geoffrey Copcutt intended to act as shields against the wind and rain to which the hilltop site was always bound to be subjected. Despite these changes, the overall achievements at Cumbernauld were to win the 1967 R S Reynolds Memorial Award for Community Architecture, beating the celebrated Finnish suburb of Tapiola.
One night in 1959, over dinner in Cumbernauld, Gillespie found himself in conversation with a man who had recently inherited a Motherwell crane construction firm from his father, but had sold the business since he had no interest in it; his great passion was for the land. He had bought two farms near Stirling, and asked Gillespie to ‘do his garden for him’ – a project that ended up costing some £31,000, as the ‘garden’ was spread over nine acres. This gave Gillespie the confidence, in 1962, to leave the Cumbernauld New Town Development Corporation and set up a private practice in Glasgow, although he was called back to Cumbernauld as a consultant on later phases of work, including Ravenswood 4.
His practice was a great success; by the time he retired in 1989, it had a staff of 124 spread across some eight offices in the UK as well as others in Cairns (Australia) and Singapore. The firm worked in Egypt on the Suez Canal project under the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), as well as in Japan, and it shared premises in Holland for the small amount of European work it carried out. Its projects encompassed new towns and town centres, motorways, and considerable amounts of work for electricity boards and water authorities. Gillespie has been engaged on feasibility studies for the Countryside Commission of Scotland, conservation studies for historic sectors including Regent’s Park in London; and planning studies for open-space systems for Glasgow, Coatbridge, Motherwell, Bishopbriggs and Milngavie. He has also been an external examiner for Sheffield University. | Private and Business Addresses| The following private or business addresses are associated with this : | | | Address | Type | Date from | Date to | Notes |  | Glasgow, Scotland | Business | | | |
Employment and TrainingEmployees or Pupils
Buildings and Designs
ReferencesBibliographic References| The following books contain references to this : | | | Author(s) | Date | Title | Part | Publisher | Notes | | Williamson, Riches, Higgs | 1990 | Glasgow (The Buildings of Scotland) | | | p408 |
Archive References| The following archives hold material relating to this : | | | Source | Archive Name | Source Catalogue No. | Notes | | Courtesy of William Gillespie | Interview of William Gillespie by Jessica Taylor, 2 February 2009 at ECA | | |
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