(John) Peter Foster

The following obituary first appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 10 March 2010

Peter Foster, who died on March 6 aged 90, was Surveyor of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey for 15 years and in charge of its restoration from 1973 until 1988; he was also an accomplished watercolourist and exhibited his work at the Royal Academy.

Foster was appointed Surveyor of the Abbey at the very moment that a start was made on the repair and restoration of the external masonry by the Westminster Abbey Restoration Trust (under the vigorous chairmanship of HRH the Duke of Edinburgh).

As the Abbey's 18th surveyor since Christopher Wren, Foster divided his working week between London and Cambridgeshire, where he ran a traditional architect's practice.

He would typically spend three days a week in London, with the first part of the morning in his office spent standing in front of his secretary Muriel, dictating letters. Afterwards he devoted himself to long hours drawing with pencil (always in feet and inches). He did all his own draughtsmanship for the 15 years he was Surveyor.

Often he would redraw things time and again with variations on a design until he was happy. As a result his architectural solutions were always scholarly, well-proportioned and carefully thought out. He frequently made models in his workshop to show how something would work, so that the person building the item knew exactly how it was to be constructed.

Beginning on the north side of the nave, Foster's repairs continued across the north transept, round the great 13th-century east end, across the south transept and by the time of his retirement, as far as two-thirds down the south side of the nave. It left only the west front and part of the Henry VII chapel to be dealt with by his successor Dr Donald Buttress.

In addition to the supervision of numerous smaller projects – several memorials and the like – he also directed, with the assistance of his deputy Julian Limentani, a three-year programme of repairs to St Margaret's Church, Westminster, independently funded by the £1 million Speaker's appeal.

He generally followed the ideas of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings but enjoyed discussing the latest concepts. He was not afraid, however, to oppose prevailing opinion if he felt it was the right thing for the venerable building in his care.

He enjoyed going "on expedition" to visit sites and the works in progress, and talking to the men carrying out repairs he was involved with. He was interested in their knowledge and experience; they in turn respected him because he took an interest in what they were doing and because he had a full practical knowledge of their work.

John Peter Foster was born on May 2 1919 at Highwoods, a Victorian country house near Burghfield in Berkshire. In 1926, when he was seven, the family moved to Holland Park, west London. At Eton he was taught how to paint by Eric Powell, an accomplished watercolourist who, with three other masters, was killed while climbing in the Alps. Peter was then schooled by Powell's successor, Robin Darwin, and by the artist Wycliffe Egginton at Teignmouth.

He read Architecture at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1940. The following year he was commissioned into the Royal Engineers, and served with the Norfolk division before joining the Guards Armoured Division in 1943 and serving in France and Germany. He married shortly before D-Day.

After operations in Normandy he helped in the liberation of Brussels before joining General Horrocks's XXX Corps and was involved in Operation Market Garden, ferrying returning soldiers from Arnhem back across the Rhine at Nijmegen. A few weeks later, he painted from memory a watercolour of the scene showing himself in a boat in the foreground.

After the war, Foster returned to Cambridge to complete his studies and, in 1948, joined the practice of Marshall Sisson, a distinguished architect in the classical style. They worked together on a number of postwar rebuilding projects on churches, and on the alteration and repair of country houses. Foster eventually became a partner in the practice and, in 1971, sole principal.

Marshall Sisson was devoted to the Royal Academy and, when he became its treasurer, he asked Foster to make drawings or watercolours of the various buildings which he had designed or restored. These were exhibited at the Academy's Summer Exhibition, together with watercolours which Foster had submitted under his own name.

Foster was appointed Surveyor to the Royal Academy in 1965 and was associated with many academicians, including the presidents. The first was Gerald Kelly, whom he had met at Eton when taking a photograph to use as a study for the background of a portrait he was painting of Montague James, the provost. In 1980 Foster was elected Master of the Art Workers' Guild.

To all his work Foster brought his gifts of scholarship and knowledge of sound traditional construction based on observation and culled from his extensive collections of historical books and drawings; he was a serious antiquarian book collector all his life. In 1989 the Judd Street Gallery held a major solo exhibition of his paintings executed over half a century. Foster was appointed OBE in 1990. His book Holiday Painter: Watercolours 1935-1998 was published in 2000.

Peter Foster married, in 1944, Margaret Skipper, who died last year. Their son and daughter survive him.

The following obituary first appeared in The Times on 30 March 2010.

Peter Foster, architect and Surveyor of Westminster Abbey 1973-88, born on 2 May 1919, died 6 March 2010, aged ninety.

Foster was an accomplished artist, drawing his plans in pencil, scaled in feet and inches, as well as a prolific watercolourist, who could complete a sketch in less than two hours. He was also exceptionally good with his hands. Entirely on his own he built a Roman Room on the south side of his house, casting the Doric columns in his own moulds, doing all the carpentry work on the coffered ceiling, and laying the marble pavement.

This concern for absolute precision in craftsmanship and choice of materials was constant throughout his work. When a large amount of limestone was needed for repairs to the Abbey he went down deep in the quarry in Lorraine and personally sought out the best seam of stone — he had noticed that repairs made by Sir Christopher Wren had long outlasted those done by his Victorian successors.

The Foster family made a fortune in worsted and mohair manufacture and were owners of the famous Black Dyke Mills in Bradford. Though Peter Foster’s father, Francis, never worked in the firm, he was wealthy enough, after First World War service commanding a flotilla of motor launches of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, to retire to Highwoods, a large Victorian house in Berkshire where Peter was born. His father liked to spend time in his workshop and set up model railways in the garden, instilling practical skills into his son that were to last a lifetime. Peter Foster also went regularly to stay at Newe, his mother’s family estate in Scotland, shooting and sketching.

His artistic talents were encouraged by a series of Eton schoolmasters. Eton, he wrote, “was expert at first discovering the talents of a boy and then nurturing them by any and every means”. With his parents he travelled widely in Europe and in 1937 went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge to study architecture, obtaining his degree in 1940 just as France fell. He promptly enrolled in the Royal Engineers and as a sapper joined the Guards Armoured Division in 1943, landing in Normandy and playing a frontline role under shell fire defusing mines (in later life he always carried a pin in his lapel — a vital aid for this work). At Arnhem he helped to ferry troops back across the nether Rhine — recorded in a dramatic watercolour he made from memory.

Returning to Cambridge he qualified as an architect and immediately joined the accomplished Cambridgeshire architect Marshall Sisson first as assistant and later partner, becoming sole principal in 1971. Sisson, a great traditionalist, was involved in the restoration of many bomb-damaged churches and when he was commissioned to move Wren’s church of St Mary Aldermanbury to Fulton, Missouri (where Churchill made his famous Iron Curtain speech), Foster did the drawings.

Foster’s work on historic churches included St Paul’s Deptford, which was suffering badly from vandalism, St Alphege Greenwich, St Andrew by the Wardrobe in the City, where he put offices in the closed-off aisles beneath the re-created galleries and the highly acclaimed conversion of St John’s Smith Square into a concert hall. He also worked for many years on Vanbrugh’s Kimbolton Castle, Cambridgeshire, renewing roofs and adding new buildings for the school.

For the late Lord de Ramsey, at Abbots Ripton Hall, he built series of estate houses, brick, rendered or timbered, in the village. He also designed a delightful series of follies for de Ramsey’s garden including a copper-roofed Chinese fishing temple, Islamic arch, and rustic bridge, adding a new feature nearly every year. Another delightful series of follies were designed for his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Edmund Staunton. They included a Millennium monument, obelisk and Doric temple — which his son-in-law built with his own hands. Inside was a beautifully lettered Latin inscription composed by Foster’s friend, the architectural historian the Rev Henry Thorold.

Foster’s interest in lettering was manifest in the Vine Press, a private printing press he established with his friend John Peters, hand-printing a series of volumes on handmade paper which are now collectors’ items. Foster also became an adept bookbinder and his fish sign is now cited in catalogues. His interest in lettering led him to design his own “Rustic Roman” face with additional flourishes to Rs and Ts. On occasion he carved the lettering himself with immense precision.

At Westminster Abbey Foster was appointed Surveyor in 1973 in a line that included Wren and Hawksmoor and immediately before him Stephen Dykes Bower. Foster took over as a great programme of stone repair and cleaning gained impetus under the Duke of Edinburgh’s appeal. With the engineer David James he devised a means of bracing, jacking, dismantling and rebuilding the flying buttresses — the tallest in Britain, and the more challenging as each arch was different.

Foster designed memorials for the abbey, notably for writers including W. H. Auden, Noël Coward and D. H. Lawrence. He also recarved the inscriptions on a number of memorial slabs worn away by feet, experimenting with inlaid metal lettering.

The partnership consisted of no more than three architects at any one time, with each partner handling his own jobs, doing all the drawings, specifications and site visits himself. Foster also designed the office chairs with leather thong seats inspired by Greek vases. He also had a workshop where he continued to make use of his father’s fine set of tools and treadle lathe. He made bookcases for his collection of architectural books which were of cabinet-maker quality and good enough to stand alongside 18th-century commodes.

Much of Foster’s travelling in later years was done with the Cathedral Architects Association, including a trip to Mexico aged 83 where, as always, he savoured the local wine. He was also Surveyor to the Royal Academy and Master of the Art Workers Guild. At Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for Sybil Cholmondeley, he built the magnificent double stone staircase on the west front, shown in engravings but never built until then. He stylishly remodelled Okeover Hall, Staffordshire and added new traditional buildings at Repton School, Derbyshire. A full list of his works is needed — houses include 9 Wilberforce Road in Cambridge which he completely rebuilt some ten years ago to a larger design.

Foster’s work ranks with the best traditionalists of the postwar years — Seely & Paget, Raymond Erith and Philip Jebb — and had he practised under his own name rather than Marshall Sisson, he would undoubtedly be better known.

Foster was married in 1944 to Margeret Skipper, the daughter of the distinguished Norwich architect George Skipper. She died last year. He is survived by a son and a daughter.