Ben Hamilton-Baillie obituary

Influential architect and leading voice in the promotion of ‘shared space’ on the roads of cities, towns and villages

Ben Hamilton-Baillie, who has died of cancer aged 63, was an architect whose pioneering work sought to reduce the impact of traffic in towns and villages. He became the UK’s most influential and innovative voice promoting the idea of “shared space” – that is, equal priority for all road users.

Hamilton-Baillie’s breakthrough was in adapting the Dutch principle of woonerven, or “home zones” – residential streets where traffic yields to pedestrians and cyclists in non-demarcated areas – to busier streets. Like the radical Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, with whom Hamilton-Baillie had worked closely, he challenged the status quo, criticising conventional traffic engineering for prioritising motor traffic to the detriment of places and people. He believed streets designed as places, rather than highways, could restore the balance between traffic and public life.

Considering the street in its entirety, in context with surrounding buildings, Hamilton-Baillie removed traffic lights, road signs, painted lines and barriers, shrank traffic lanes and reduced visual boundaries between pavement and road with decorative surfacing, while introducing “informal” or suggested crossings.

This almost libertarian approach forced drivers to slow down, interact with, and yield to, pedestrians. He said: “I have my severe doubts of the wisdom of giving drivers a green light in the city centre,” believing it gives an inappropriate sense of priority. To demonstrate his schemes were safe, he would often lie down in the middle of the road.

Hamilton-Baillie’s most celebrated work was in the town of Poynton, Cheshire, where a busy, congested crossroads through its heart was accelerating the town’s decline. His bold plans, which were completed in 2012, saw the removal of traffic lights for the 27,000 daily vehicle movements, replaced with a “double roundel”, where vehicles negotiate priority with pedestrians and cyclists, and various other measures to reduce traffic speeds.

This approach had never been trialled on such a scale and many were sceptical. Yet despite some criticisms of insufficient cycling provision, Hamilton-Baillie’s design is credited with lifting the town’s fortunes by improving the public realm, bringing weekend visitors to pavement cafes, and making it easier for elderly and disabled residents to cross the road.

The scheme won the Highways Excellence award (2013) and the Urban Transport Design award (2014), whose judges said: “Poynton has rewritten the so-called rule book for roundabout design. Or maybe it has simply pushed ‘rules’ aside, in favour of designing ways to moderate behaviour, improve interaction, and create genuine streets for all.”

In Ashford, Kent, Hamilton-Baillie arguably pushed boundaries even further, turning the town’s ring road into a narrower two-way street he described as akin to a corridor, with lobbies at each intersection. While the outcome can be uncomfortable to negotiate by car – a deliberate intention to encourage driver vigilance – traffic speeds dropped to around 20mph, and people can now cross the road wherever they like. His work also inspired the transformation of Exhibition Road, in central London.

The term “shared space” can polarise opinion. Organisations representing blind people reject the idea that such zones provide equal priority for all users, due to what can be a lack of physical cues to navigate the space. However, Hamilton-Baillie recognised that the needs of blind and partially sighted people were perhaps ignored in the early days of so-called shared streets, and he attempted to address those concerns with his use of materials and spatial cues.

Born in Iserlohn, Germany, Ben was the son of Lettice (nee Pumphrey) and Jock Hamilton-Baillie, an army engineer and teacher, and noted multiple PoW camp escapee, including attempts from Colditz, during the second world war, which won him the Military Cross.

In early life the family moved between Germany, Yemen and Britain, while Ben attended Winchester college, before studying architecture at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, from 1974. Following a year in Hamburg and his professional exams, he “tried out” six cities and settled in Bristol, where he remained most of his life. In 1988 he married Jennifer Hill, a social worker.

After an early career working in social housing, Hamilton-Baillie joined Sustrans in 1995 to develop the charity’s millennium cycle routes project in south-west England and Wales. He then won a Churchill fellowship to tour Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, where he began to develop ideas on shared space, meeting and learning directly from Monderman.

In 2000, he became the first Briton to win a Loeb fellowship at Harvard. There, medical research had revealed that the speed at which a skull fractures was similar to the speed at which traffic flows smoothly, ie, around 18mph. This unhappy coincidence was a lightbulb moment for Hamilton-Baillie. When speeds increase, drivers have to brake, creating stop-start traffic. He realised that if he could slow traffic to the speed that it naturally flows, this could significantly improve a person’s chance of survival were they to be hit by a vehicle.

He founded Hamilton-Baillie Associates in 2004, where he began to put his ideas into practice, drawing up designs for towns, cities and villages – some of which became reality.

In 2011, with Dorset county council, he authored Traffic in Villages, a toolkit to address growing rural traffic issues using “psychological traffic calming” rather than signage. Together with publicity from Poynton, word spread across rural communities, many of whom commissioned Hamilton-Baillie reports on taming traffic and reviving a sense of place. The document continues to be influential in local policymaking.

Hamilton-Baillie’s sense of fun, enthusiasm for life and calm persuasiveness, along with a gift for oratory, was known to win over sceptics and soothe nervous officials. His passion for adventure was expressed in active holidays he organised with large groups of friends, often with an element of risk.

He is survived by Jennifer, and their two children, Laurence and Agnes.

• Benjamin Robert Hamilton-Baillie, architect and street designer, born 4 July 1955; died 3 March 2019

Contributor

Laura Laker

The GuardianTramp

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