John Godwin (1928–2023)
John Godwin (1928–2023)
A story that caught my eye is the one of John Godwin, an architect who spent 60 years working in Nigeria with his wife, Gillian Hopwood. He died this past February.
The Telegraph has a nice obit:
John Godwin was born at Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire on June 17 1928; his father William was an architect whose career was mainly at the Ministry of Works. The family of his mother, Laura Godwin, née Watkins, had Belgian connections, and John was sent to attend school there in the autumn of 1939, but escaped on the last boat.
He attended Wimborne Grammar School and Wrekin College, then Kingston School of Art, gaining a Leverhulme Scholarship to enter the Architectural Association School (AA) in London aged 17 in 1945, doing National Service afterwards in the Royal Engineers. He excelled as a student, and married Gillian, who was in the same year group, in 1951.
After initially getting a job in Lagos, they both decided to settle there and started their own architecture practice. They ended up designing more than 1,000 buildings in Nigeria. After training Europeans and Nigerians, their practice eventually transferred to Nigerians and is today known as Godwin Hopwood Kuye. They mostly disengaged with architecture practice in 1989 but remained as consultants until they moved back to England in 2017, sixty-three years after they first moved to the country.
The Forever Missed page in his honour has a lot of lovely comments (and about 30 photos) by Nigerians who interacted with him as students and friends.
I confess I had never heard of him until I came across his obit (my interaction with architecture in Nigeria has been very limited). But this closing part of the obituary stood out to me:
Godwin and Hopwood settled permanently in England in 2017, bringing their practice archive with them, which is in the process of transfer to the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montreal. Both have been recorded for the Architects’ Lives programme of the National Life Story Collection, and a book on their practice is due to be published by Birkhauser in late 2023
They did do their bit to document Lagos history (Gillian presented her coffee table photobook in Lagos in 2015). But it did make me think about how a bit of Nigerian history is lost with his death to the afterlife and the archiving of his work in Canada.
May his memory be a blessing
Addendum: Thanks to twitter, I came across this interview John and Gillian gave in 2015 — PM News