The Sociologist Within: The Disappearing Case of Margaret Willis in the LCC Architect’s Department

The creation of an Architect’s Department at the London County Council provided a platform within the mechanisms of local government which challenged definitions of professional boundaries and accepted forms of practice. In contrast to their peers in private practice, the structures of employment within the Council placed these architects within a broader network of extra-professional resources. Alongside the connection with legislative, economic, and industrial agency, the Department’s human resources included the services of the sociologist Margaret Willis, who was based in the Reconstruction Group of the Town Planning Division in room 694 of North Block, in the midst of the Architect’s Department.1 Whilst early attempts by the Department at engaging public participation to inform their urban and architectural propositions had been obstructed, Willis’ act of infra-professional collaboration established a connectivity to agencies and experiences beyond the domain of the Department, facilitating ingenuity in the architecture produced as a result.

It is an oft-cited fact that the LCC employed a sociologist, yet whilst the influence of her work upon the urban and residential schemes proposed by the Department in the post-war period has been celebrated, her work itself has gone unseen. This obfuscation developed in three phases: in producing work anonymously in the spirit of collaborative contribution common to contemporaneous bureaucratic practice, in the active repression of her work to be published beyond the Department, and in the posthumous archiving of her research as a subcategory of the more prominent names of the Department. As a result, although the biographies and work of those with whom she shared both projects and workspace - of Walter Bor, Graham Shankland, and Percy Johnson Marshall - have since emerged, the location and demands of Willis’ position, her means of operation, and the documentation she produced have remained masked by the Department’s protocols.

Through recourse to archival documentation, this paper demonstrates not only the role Willis played, but also the mechanisms of the bureaucratic environment through which such stories are lost. It asserts the value that such resources beyond that which we might ordinarily deem ‘architectural’ bestowed to employment within a bureaucratic environment, and confronts the challenges posed in redefining the boundaries of architectural histories to include such contributions.