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Tom Kay: a campaigner for tenants’ rights |
Architect with designs on justice
TOM Kay, who has died aged 72, will be remembered as an architect who used his professional expertise not only to design a number of striking buildings in Camden and elsewhere, but also for his political principles of social justice and equality.
Kay, who designed his own family home and office in Murray Mews, Camden Town, was born in 1935, the son of Ellen and Leo Knopfelmacher. The pair were Communist Party members from Germany and Czechoslovakia and left central Europe as war loomed.
Tom was raised in Montreal, Canada, but returned to England when he was 15. He studied architecture at Westminster Polytechnic in the 1950s and after a brief spell in Erno Goldfinger’s practice moved on to the London County Council’s architecture department.
He refused to do National Service as a conscientious objector and after a period of alternative service at University College Hospital left England to travel to India.
On the way he stopped off in Israel, where he landed a job designing a high profile building for the country’s national aircraft company, El Al. When he came back he worked for Austin Smith, a large architectural practice, before setting up on his own in the early 1960s. Not long after he met his wife Adah, a sociologist and planner, and it was following a trip to the US in the late 1960s that their joint local involvement in local housing and planning politics began.
Tom was very much a local architect and became part of a movement that campaigned for tenants’ rights and better social housing policies.
He was aware of the help tenants – so many of them his neighbours – often needed to ensure their landlords were not riding roughshod over their rights. With Adah, he joined a small group of other activists including the barrister Stephen Sedley – now an appeal court judge – that set up Camden Housing Action. This group represented tenants in court and helped establish the two Camden Community Law Centres.
The group campaigned on homeless issues, lobbying Camden Council to offer short-term lets in homes that were lying empty and due to be re-developed in the future. Under pressure from the Camden Housing Action, the council agreed to offer short-term tenancy agreements to homeless people and help ease the acute housing shortage in the borough.
While Sedley helped with the legal aspect of the work, Tom used his architectural expertise to offer surveys on homes. Lord Justice Sedley recalls Tom’s determination. He said: “As an architect Tom was concerned with making sure people had homes.”
Throughout his working life Tom taught architecture part time and was known for being an exacting but sympathetic teacher.
In his later years, Tom and Adah decided to go and live and work in Palestine where he was visiting professor at Ramallah’s Birzeit University. During this time he relentlessly documented the development and impact of the Occupation through despatches and photos and highlighted Israel’s use of planning and architecture in the conflict.
DAN CARRIER |
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