My friend Peter White, who has died aged 76, fell in love with canals while studying at the Birmingham School of Architecture in the early 1960s. On qualifying he worked as an architect in the city and began campaigning to change attitudes towards the local waterways, usually regarded, if considered at all, as filthy backwaters in which to dump supermarket trollies.
He developed one area at the top of the Farmers Bridge flight of locks, restoring old buildings and adding a new pub, to create what became James Brindley Walk.
As a direct result of this scheme, he was invited by Sir Frank Price, former head of Birmingham city council, and then chairman of British Waterways Board, to join BWB as architect/planner. Peter was always proud to say that he was the first architect to be employed on the canals since Thomas Telford.
Throughout his work at BWB he concentrated on what he saw as the vital job of restoring and maintaining the essential historic qualities of the canals and their structures. He produced the official Waterways Environmental Handbook (1972), which was the essential guide to sensitive restoration that would preserve the robust character of vernacular buildings and, at the same time, recognise that different canals had very different characters.
It was never a call for uniformity; and as well as looking at preserving the past it laid out guidelines for creating new structures. One interesting task he took on in the 1970s was creating an authentic canal repair yard at the Black Country Museum in Dudley. In 1991 he was appointed MBE.
Peter was the twin son of Eileen (nee Hayter), a dispensing chemist, and George White, who worked in insurance for the National Farmers’ Union. He was born in Shipston on Stour, Warwickshire, and grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he attended the town’s grammar school. He was a bit of a rebel and was told he need not apply to the sixth form – fortunately Birmingham School of Architecture did not require A-levels at the time.
Peter was forced to retire from the BWB in 1991 after severe heart problems, which gave him the opportunity to begin painting, usually rather Turneresque canal scenes. His first exhibition, in 1992, at Stratford grammar school, was called, with typical humour, Art Attack.
Peter was the perfect companion for any canal trip. Apart from being excellent company, he had a knack for spotting the fascinating detail of a building or structure. It was like attending the perfect seminar on canal engineering. Today the canals of Birmingham are bustling with life and accepted as a real asset to the city, but the development might never have happened without Peter’s enthusiastic advocacy and demonstration of what could be done. And thanks to him, holidaymakers on the canal system as a whole travel through an environment that preserves the character that it had when first developed some two centuries ago.
Peter is survived by his brother, John, his wife Paula (nee Gilman), whom he married in 1965, their children Katey and Oliver, and grandchildren, Sophy and James. A third child, Emma, died young.
