Gavin Stamp was a prolific and unusually level-headed architectural writer and historian. Less emotional than Ian Nairn, pithier and more immediate than Nikolaus Pevsner (he knew both men), Stamp wrote definitive books on grand and humble subjects. These ranged from his hero Edwin Lutyens, to brutalism, to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s scarlet telephone boxes of 1935. The last he first defended in a piece for The Spectator 50 years later, which led to a campaign that saved a clutch of them.

For Stamp, journalism and campaigning bled into one another. He co-founded the Thirties Society in 1979 – now the influential Twentieth Century Society – to save the era’s buildings. He understood that future generations may value the structures of our recent past in different ways, perhaps unforeseeable to us. Without his efforts, Scott’s Battersea Power Station would likely have been turned to rubble decades ago. Writing as Piloti for Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ column, he exposed planning fraud and architectural vandalism.

Lutyens’s Cenotaph is superficially simple but highly complex, and perfectly expressed the nation’s grief

Stamp was at work on an investigation into a definitive history of British architecture between the Great War and the Blitz when he died in 2017 at 69. Now, his final book has been completed by his widow, the historian and writer Rosemary Hill. The result is both vital and clear, a book steeped in technical detail, full of meticulous attention, yet accessible and without prejudice – never dry and certainly not florid.

That architectural era has been oddly underexplored. Perhaps part of the reason lies in the effort required to make sense of its dynamism. There were all those overlapping, seemingly competing styles: beaux arts; neoclassicism and ‘the grand manner’; lingering arts and crafts; functionalism and art deco. There were countless subtrends, too: jazz modern, seaside moderne, Egyptian revivalism, mock-Mayan and Tudor-bethan. One irony is that the book reveals the term ‘interwar’ to be meaningless.

In her foreword, Hill suggests that Stamp was drawn to the era because its architecture was at risk in his lifetime:

At any given moment the most inaccessible period is that which is just within living memory. Too much material is still in private hands, too many axes are still being ground; the recent past is always on the move.

Now that era is slipping from view, and Stamp reframes it as exciting – its jumble of styles an expression of dynamism and expansiveness. Think of the period’s lavish civic buildings and their superficial similarities yet wild variations. There is C.H. James and S. Rowland Pierce’s functionalist-classical town hall in Norwich of 1938 with its reassuringly familiar additions – columns and campanile; contrast this with Clifford Culpin’s high-functionalist council offices in Greenwich of 1939, more one-eyed monster than benign authority.

The decades’ experiments in national and international styles still dominate British towns and cities in everything from churches to offices to factories to power stations to private housing. Stamp chooses Herbert Rowse’s tower at St George’s Dock, Liverpool of 1935 as ‘perhaps the most unexpectedly sublime example’ – all brick edifice, zigzagging and Egyptian flourish: so much aspiration, conscientiousness and faith packed into a Mersey tunnel ventilation shaft. But the book also reveals how eclecticism emerged from a depleted, disorientated country struggling to articulate itself in the aftermath of war. That confusion is reflected in the discourse and criticism that Stamp quotes throughout the text, which swings between reactionary outrage from traditionalists and enthusiasm from progressives for the new possibilities presented by steel-framed building technology.

The traditionalists mostly got their way in housing. Stamp describes how ultra-modern designs – what Pevsner called ‘a genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion’ – were routinely hated, subjected to ‘strong opposition from many local authorities’ and often passed over. The era’s most radical experiments tended to end up – and are still to be found – at ‘what might be described as fringe conditions: by the seaside or in zoos or in peculiar locations’. Those that did exist were not so much due to the achievements of British architects but European Jewish émigrés seeking refuge, such as Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger.

Stamp’s backdrop – the bewildering pace of cultural and political change of the period mirrored by the speed of stylistic trends – seems impossible. But then our own cultural era is moving fast, even if we do not see it. His first chapter, perhaps his most compelling, is a good example. It deals with war memorials: the works of a nation coming to terms with catastrophic loss. Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph of 1920, in particular, has become totemic in a culture war since Stamp’s death. The chapter explains how the Cenotaph – ‘an object that… perfectly expressed the inarticulate grief of a nation’ – is superficially simple but highly complex.

Lutyens’s monument is abstract, like grief. It is the opposite of sentimental, a secular acknowledgment that war means slaughter, ruin and loss. It is not just a block: its mass diminishes as it rises, and the verticals and horizontals are not straight lines. This gives it visual dynamism, and what the historian Christopher Hussey called its ‘magic quality’. A hundred years ago, the Cenotaph was realised only after sober, respectful public debates. It is impossible to read Stamp’s account of its history without contrasting his cool, attentive tone with last November’s antagonism, when, on Armistice Day, police placed the Cenotaph in an exclusion zone, partly to prevent protests by pro-Palestine marchers descending on it. In the event, 150 far-right protesters attempted to reach it. Britain’s monument to its war dead signifies something new now: a flashpoint for nationalism. I found myself missing Stamp’s updated assessment. He excels at context.

In other ways, the conservatives-vs-moderns debates he describes feel very 21st century. His sources are the contemporaneous architectural press and national newspapers. By 1933, the ideological battle was the theme of the presidential address at the Royal Institute of British Architects and the subject of a debate printed in the Listener. Today, these same spats are played out noisily (and with dreary routine) on social media, between choruses of architecturally conservative ‘trads’ and leftish-liberal modernism enthusiasts. In this context, Stamp’s gravitas is a refreshing contrast to all that reductive noise. He tends not to take an ideological position and he is no snob. The architecture of the new suburbs, for example, then as now, mostly reflected what people wanted.

One small but vital detail that demonstrates the publisher’s careful attention to Stamp’s last book: his examples require good photography, but the editors never assume readers are as familiar with the buildings as he is. The photographs nearly always line up with the text. There’s no flipping around to find the illustration.

Battersea Power Station’s survival may be among Stamp’s greatest achievements. He did not live to see its rebirth in 2022 as a glitzy residential/shopping destination/hotel/office. Its new immediate neighbours, the cluster of expensive glassy towers that make up the Nine Elms development, are unlikely to have pleased him. But perhaps that doesn’t matter. A great slab of interwar industrial history has been decontaminated, rescued, restored and strengthened, ready for future generations with new and different priorities from our own to do with as they wish.