Gavin Stamp (1948-2018)
Christmas Card, 1975 – St Martin’s Military Church, Delhi

Ballpoint pen and ink
21 x 20 cm

Born in 1948, Gavin Stamp was educated on a London County Council Scholarship at Dulwich College and took a degree in history and architectural history at Cambridge. He moved to London in 1972 and worked as an architectural draughtsman and graphic designer, combining this with journalism and cataloguing at the RIBA drawings collection. By the late 1970s he was describing himself as ‘an odd-job man in the vicious cut-throat world of architectural history’. Over the course of his career, his scholarship and enthusiasm promoted the understanding and celebration of several great but neglected architects, while he also succeeded in saving many 19th and 20th century buildings from demolition.

Sourced from his estaste, Gavin Stamp designed this Christmas card depicting St Martin’s Military Church, Delhi in the winter of 1975. The pared back aesthetic allows us to appreciate the neatness of the parallel dashes and the pleasing pointillist effect created across the trees.