Ronald William Brunskill OBE (3 January 1929 – 9 October 2015) was an English academic who was

Reader A reader is a person who reads. It may also refer to: Computing and technology * Adobe Reader (now Adobe Acrobat), a PDF reader * Bible Reader for Palm, a discontinued PDA application * A card reader, for extracting data from various forms of ...

in Architecture at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

. He was an authority on the

history of architecture The history of architecture traces the changes in architecture through various traditions, regions, overarching stylistic trends, and dates. The beginnings of all these traditions is thought to be humans satisfying the very basic need of shelt ...

and particularly on British

vernacular architecture Vernacular architecture is building done outside any academic tradition, and without professional guidance. This category encompasses a wide range and variety of building types, with differing methods of construction, from around the world, bo ...

. He was born in

Lowton Lowton is a suburban village within the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan, in Greater Manchester, England. It is around from Leigh, south of Wigan and west of Manchester city centre. The settlement lies across the A580 East Lancashire Road. ...

and attended Bury High School, before studying architecture under Reginald Cordingley at the University of Manchester. After a two-year stint with the British Army, Brunskill was appointed to a

London County Council London County Council (LCC) was the principal local government body for the County of London throughout its existence from 1889 to 1965, and the first London-wide general municipal authority to be directly elected. It covered the area today kn ...

commission of architects. He left that position to teach at his alma mater, then spent a year at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

as a Commonwealth Fund fellow. He joined

Williams Deacon's Bank Williams Deacon's Bank was acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1930. It had a large network of branches in the north-west of England. In 1970, it was integrated with Glyn, Mills & Co. and The National Bank (which were part of the same gro ...

in 1957, and oversaw the maintenance of 250 branch offices, designing twenty new buildings. Brunskill returned to Manchester as reader in 1960. Brunskill contributed significantly to assessing the date, extent and impact of the

Great Rebuilding A Great Rebuilding is a period in which a heightened level of construction work, architectural change, or rebuilding occurred. More specifically, W. G. Hoskins defined the term "The Great Rebuilding" in England as the period from the mid-16th centu ...

of England. Brunskill accepted that for much of England W. G. Hoskins's thesis that the Great Rebuilding spanned the period from 1570 to 1640. But Brunskill contended that the period varied both by region and by social class: starting in

South East England South East England is one of the nine official regions of England at the first level of ITL for statistical purposes. It consists of the counties of Buckinghamshire, East Sussex, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Kent, Oxfordshire, Berkshi ...

and among the higher-income social classes, and then spreading both geographically west and north and socially to lower-income classes.Brunskill, 1971, page 27 In 1990 Brunskill was awarded an OBE for services to conservation. He was married to Miriam Allsopp, with whom he had two daughters, from 1960 until his death in 2015.

Published works

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References

British architectural historians Academics of the Victoria University of Manchester 2015 deaths Architecture academics Officers of the Order of the British Empire 1929 births People from Lowton Alumni of the Victoria University of Manchester Massachusetts Institute of Technology fellows British expatriate academics in the United States {{UK-historian-stub