In 1965, when he was in his early 20s, my friend Peter Howell, who has died aged 85, was asked by Nikolaus Pevsner to join the buildings committee of the Victorian Society, which had been founded seven years earlier by Pevsner, John Betjeman and others to defend Victorian buildings.
Peter remained a member of the committee, which reviewed the cases submitted to the society, for the rest of his life. He had joined the society in 1962 as a result of his horror at a proposal that Balliol College, Oxford – where he was then an undergraduate – might demolish its entrance range, designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1867. This was the beginning of Peter’s crusade to prevent the loss or mutilation of Britain’s 19th-century architectural heritage.
