Bob Owston obituary
My friend and colleague, Bob Owston, who has died aged 88, was an engineer; he was also employed as a project architect, in particular on works at York University.He was the structural engineer, working with the architect Jack Speight, on the brutalist York Central Hall, built in the mid-1960s and now listed Grade II.Also at York, Bob contributed an elegant Corten steel footbridge, several halls of residence, language and psychology blocks and the Sally Baldwin building.Elsewhere, he was responsible for the pier approach building in Bournemouth, evocative of seaside culture.Born in Great Ayton near Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, Bob was the son of Henry, a steelworks manager, and Dorothy (nee Prosser).
He was evacuated with his mother and elder brother, John, to the Lake District during the second world war.His father had a motorbike accident and died when Bob was eight.The family moved to Glasgow, where his mother found work at the Harland & Wolff shipbuilding company.A family friend paid for the boys to board at Ashville college, Harrogate.Bob studied civil engineering at Strathclyde University, graduating in 1960, then worked in London at Ove Arup & Partners.
An MSc followed at Northwestern University in Chicago, where Bob nurtured his love of jazz and blues music, returning with a Gibson acoustic guitar.In the 1960s he went as an engineer to Robert Matthew Johnson Marshall & Partners (RMJM), where my father, the architect Sir Andrew Derbyshire, was the partner responsible for designing the new University of York.Andrew supported Bob’s determination to migrate from engineering to architecture, and he passed the RIBA part III examination and interview.He and I became friends, sharing evenings listening to blues records when he moved to join RMJM’s Cambridge studio, and I was at the university doing my master’s.Later in life, we shared holidays with our respective families.
Bob was made redundant at RMJM during the 80s recession and came to work with me as an associate and team leader at HTA Architects.He contributed some wonderfully original yet entirely practical buildings: a tower block renovation at Nightingale Heights in Greenwich that won a Housing Design award stands out, as do two richly inventive community centres, at Waltham Forest housing action trust and Central Oakridge regeneration in Basingstoke.Bob also had a passion for designing, building and flying model aeroplanes, which led on to model gliders.He is survived by his second wife, Jane Steele, whom he married in 1997, and their daughter, Phoebe; his daughters, Sophie and Jo, from his first marriage, to Katy (nee Stenhouse), which ended in divorce; and by five grandchildren, Otama, Evie, Manu, Poppy and Seb.
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Bob Owston obituary
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