an AA memoir by Christopher Woodward
The seventy new arrivals to the first year at the AA in1957 were accommodated on the first floor of the Morwell Street block. In a simulacrum of an architect’s office, on either side of a central corridor were rows of trestle tables, each supporting a double-elephant size drawing board and hardwood t-square. Drawing was clearly going to be important. Students were placed in alphabetical order, starting at the door, running to the end of the room, then returning on the other side, to the door. Those with names early in the alphabet (MH) found themselves across the corridor from those later (‘CW’), and from this accident what were to become life-long friendships sparked and matured.
The new students were a mixed bunch, some younger and straight from school, others, like Martyn, had done their National Service or had just taken up their studies again after the end of the world war in 1945. As we worked through the first year curriculum, drawing exercises led to a first attempt at design, a changing pavilion for a swimming pool. We were taught how to set up 2- and 3-point perspectives (magic!). When asked to illustrate our projects, many of us produced thin pen drawings and carefully coloured these in with water colour. Martyn’s experience at school with a charismatic art teacher came in handy: his perspectives were sketchy, scratchy, and coloured with broad strokes of gouache.
In the second to fourth years (no ‘gap year’ then) we worked through the curriculum devised by James Gowan, John Killick and Peter Smithson: design studies of each successive year of the three were based on the village, town and city.
At the beginning of the fifth, final, year Martyn returned, newly married to Jenny. In the search for a Diploma project, conversations in the holiday had also led ML, CW and Jim Hodges to consider doing a group project together, and they hit on ‘working up’ a characteristic housing area of the recently-published Master Plan prepared by the LCC in 1961 for a new town at Hook in Hampshire. Group work, though treated suspiciously by the school because it made marking individual students a problem, was quite fashionable, and the result, assessed by a panel including Oliver Cox and Alison Smithson, was well-received. The group was tutored throughout by Alan Colquhoun who, while saying little, impressed on us the importance of thinking very hard: he left us with one of what became the most memorable of his aphorisms: “I think you’ll find I’m right”. Cedric Price occasionally dropped by and Year Master Robert Maxwell provided pastoral care. Glamourous visitors to the studio included Louis Kahn who stopped to chat with Martyn and asked what a brick wanted to be (but at that time he probably asked everyone that).
Having been head-hunted during the final term, on the day after this ended, MH and CW and others started work for the team that Colin Buchanan was leading to prepare the report that became ‘Traffic in Towns’ for the Minister of Transport. We became civil servants, signed the Official Secrets Act, and studied the effect of constrained and un-constrained traffic growth on access London’s Fitzrovia. The press misread this as a plan to cover London in 16-lane motorways, something our studies on the fourth year had clearly equipped us for. The report changed little: soon after its publication, in 1963, the minister, Ernest Marples lost his job, as did we.
From 1965, Martyn worked for Associated Architects and Consultants, Bill Allen (former Principal of the AA School) with Peter Rich and Birkin Haward, the three making a team designing and building a large housing scheme at Harlow New Town.
In 1965 he set up a practice with George Kasabov (AA 1954–59 ) and together they developed, designed and built a row of spacious three-storey houses on a site overlooking Highgate Cemetery. The Haxworth family established themselves at the end of the terrace, finding themselves sharing a garden wall with Leonard Manasseh (AA 1935–).
The partnership with Kasabov lasted until 1970 when Martyn set up a new practice with JCW Hodges (‘Jim’, one of the Hook Housing trio) who had left the Central Electricity Board, his sponsors for his AA studies. Jim brought several CEGB jobs with him, and the practice was also supported by rapid surveys for NHS hospitals. In 1974 the practice was secure and large enough to allow the partners to buy and develop a small freehold plot in West Smithfield in the City of London. They developed this their office housing the practice’s staff of about ten. They were joined in 1980 by Penelope Martin-Jones who arrived from Ahrends Burton and Koralek (AA). Clients continued to be the CEGB and NHS until the practice was dissolved in 1987 when the Haxworths moved to their last family home in Charlbury in Oxfordshire, while Martyn continued to practise on his own from West Smithfield until 2004 when he worked from home. In 2014 he became too ill to continue working. At his death in 2016 he had just completed a small ‘gatehouse’ – a two-room studio that he was never able to use.
Martyn had kept all his student work and meticulously catalogued it, together with the typed briefs to which we worked, and the reports of reviews that Year Masters made. I last saw him on a visit to Charlbury in 2014 to discuss who might be interested in housing this portfolio. He agreed that the AA would be its most suitable home where it now joins the 10,000 other drawings in the AA Archives.
Martyn Leslie Haxworth, architect, born 3 September month 1937; died 26 September 2016.
Click on the following link to be directed to the online AA Archive where you can see some of
Haxworth's wor