Basil Spence was born in Bombay to Scottish parents, trained in Edinburgh, and worked for a year in Edwin Lutyens's London office on the New Delhi drawings before setting up on his own. He made his early name on exhibition pavilions and country houses, spent the war in army camouflage and landed in Normandy in 1944, and then took the competition launched in 1950 for a new cathedral at Coventry against more than two hundred entries. His insistence that the bombed shell of the old St Michael's be kept as a ruin, with the new church alongside it, is the decision the whole design rests on. Spence was no doctrinaire modernist: he treated a building as a setting for commissioned art, coordinating Sutherland, Piper, Epstein and Hutton at Coventry as deliberately as he detailed the stone. Later work at Sussex and Hyde Park Barracks divided opinion sharply.
