Frederick Gibberd

Sir Frederick Ernest Gibberd CBE (7 January 1908 – 9 January 1984) was an English architect, town planner and landscape designer.

He is particularly known for his work in Harlow, Essex, and for the BISF house, a design for a prefabricated council house that was widely adopted in post-war Britain.

Gibberd was born in Coventry, the eldest of the five children of a local tailor, and was educated at the city's King Henry VIII School.

In 1925 he was articled to a firm of architects in Birmingham and studied architecture under William Bidlake at the Birmingham School of Art, where his roommate was F. R. S. Yorke.

A good friend of Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, Gibberd's work was also influenced by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and F. R. S. Yorke.

He set up in practice in 1930, designing Pullman Court, Streatham Hill, London (1934–36), a housing development which launched his career.

With the success of this scheme, Gibberd became established as the 'flat' architect and went on to build several other schemes including Park Court, Sydenham, London (1936) and Ellington Court, Southgate, London (1936) continuing to practise until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Gibberd and Yorke collaborated on a number of publications including the influential book The Modern Flat, which was published in 1937 and featured the then newly completed Pullman Court and Park Court, as well as many other European examples.

He also designed the BISF house, a prefabricated form of council housing sponsored by the British Iron and Steel Federation and widely adopted by local authorities in Britain in the postwar period.

Gibberd was consultant architect planner for the Harlow development and spent the rest of his life living in the town he had designed.

His most notable works here include The Lawn, Britain's first modern-style point block, consisting of nine storeys arranged in a butterfly design on an area of open ground surrounded by oak trees; a trompe-l'oeil pair of curved terraces facing a cricket green at Orchard Croft, which won a British Housing Award in 1951; the pioneering broken-silhouette flats in Morley Grove; and much of the housing in Mark Hall neighbourhood, which is in its entirety a conservation area.

The Harvey Centre lacks architectural distinction, but is notable as an early British example of a large purpose-built indoor shopping mall.

His similarly pioneering Sports Centre has been demolished, as has the original town hall.

The Water Gardens, although listed by English Heritage, have been spoilt by the abutment of a car park and shopping centre.

The garden of his personal home at Marsh Lane (Gibberd Garden), on the outskirts of Harlow, a mixture of formal and informal design, contains architectural elements salvaged from his reconstruction of Coutts Bank in London.

A further achievement by Gibberd in planning Harlow is his incorporation of works by many leading architects of the postwar years, such as FRS Yorke, Powell & Moya, Graham Dawbarn, John Poulson, Maxwell Fry & Jane Drew, Michael Neylan, William Crabtree, Leonard Manasseh, ECP Monson, Gerard Goalen, Gerald Lacoste, Richard Sheppard and H. T. Cadbury-Brown.

A substantial collection of public sculptures is visible around the town, including works by Henry Moore, Elisabeth Frink, Auguste Rodin and Barbara Hepworth.

Gibberd wrote Harlow: The story of a New Town in collaboration with Len White and Ben Hyde Harvey.

In 1953 he published Town Design a book on the forms, processes, and history of the subject.

He married first Dorothy Phillips, with whom he had one son and two daughters.

Gibberd was made a CBE in 1954 and knighted in 1967.

His architectural firm, Frederick Gibberd Partnership, continues to practise in London.

She died in 1970.

He then married Mrs Patricia Fox-Edwards on 30 March 1972.

They remained married until his death.

In 2019, a new school in Harlow was named Sir Frederick Gibberd College.

Built by Caledonian Modular from 198 prefabricated modules, the school was forced to close in August 2023 due to concerns about structural irregularities.

In December 2023, the DfE confirmed that the college would be demolished and rebuilt.