(1930 – 2021)
London’s architect
This obituary was largely written by Christopher Dodd in February 2021 for the website Hear The Boat Sing. It is reproduced here with HTBS’ and Christopher’s permissions, supplemented with more detail about his rowing career at LRC and at international level.
Simon Crosse, who died on 14th January 2021 at the age of 90, joined London in 1952 while a student at the Architectural Association. He was a giant oarsman, weighing in at 14 stone 4 lbs and standing at 6 feet 3½ inches.
He rowed for the Club at Henley, often at stroke, in each of the years 1953 to 1957, once in the Grand, three times in the Thames Cup, and once each in the Stewards’, the Wyfolds and the Goblets (in the latter with John Vigurs). His best races were in the Thames Cup in 1955 and 1957 when London had fine battles in the semi-finals, leading up to Fawley and the Mile respectively before losing out to the opposition.
In 1958 he jumped ship to Colin Porter’s Barn Cottage with whom he won a gold medal in the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games on Llyn Padarn, Wales, with Porter, Vigurs and Mike Beresford. He won the Stewards with Barn Cottage in 1958 and 1960, the Wyfolds with Molesey in 1959 and the Grand, again with Molesey, in 1960 (it will be noted that he therefore won two events at Henley in 1960 rowing for different, albeit closely linked, clubs). He was one of the Club’s first post-War internationals, and a contemporary of the London scullers, Tony Fox and Doug Melvin. He rowed for GB in coxed fours in the European Championships in Poznan in 1958 and Macon in 1959, and in the Molesey eight which competed in the Rome Olympics in 1960.
Crosse then retired from competitive rowing and started his architectural career in earnest. He joined the renowned architectural practice of Feilden and Mawson which took him to Norwich, but when London decided to renovate its boathouse in the late 1960s he was the obvious choice.
The building, designed by a London member, George Dunnage, had opened in January 1871 and was possibly the first boathouse to incorporate social facilities with boat storage. The last major work on the main building had been carried out in 1891. By 1969 it was in a sorry state, Crosse noting that wet rot from the first floor loos was damaging the boats below. The shower facilities consisted of a zinc trough and a bucket of cold water. There was decayed linoleum on the floor of the changing room, icy blasts from ill-fitting windows and a mound of festering abandoned kit.
The entrance to the club was at the upstream end, giving access to a lobby full of empty barrels and bottles and a hatch through which pints were once passed to boatmen and others of that ilk not permitted to rub shoulders with gentlemen members. There was an inadequate kitchen, and the descent from the changing room was down a rickety wooden staircase with one light bulb. The cavernous boatshed had pools of mud on the floor. Tom Phelps, the club waterman, looked after the ancient fleet in conditions that would have made Fagin weep. Peter Coni, the Hon Treasurer, was the club’s fixer who laid out – in a typical Conigram – the problem and the solution. The members voted for extension and refurbishment, and Crosse was commissioned to design a new entrance at the downstream end of the building with a staircase leading to an office and a new club room (the Fairbairn) above new changing rooms on the ground floor at the back over what had been a lawn adjoining Spring Passage.
It started well when Graham Hill, F1 world champion and sometime stroke of LRC’s Grand eight, drove an old Morris Oxford that had been purchased for £5 into the wall separating the club from Spring Passage. He took three runs at it, and the car was sold on for £15. Rowing was moved to the Rutland boathouse in Hammersmith while work was in progress. Of course, costs soared, Spring Passage having turned out to be springier than envisaged. Parts of the scheme, such as glazing over the balcony for fine dining and enclosing the roof grandstand, were abandoned. The new copper boiler was nicked before installation and never seen again.
In 1971 costs had risen to £71,000 and funds were £14,000 short. Coni and Crosse expanded the appeal for money, and Crosse declared that Coni was his best client: ‘He knew my heart was in the right place, but nothing else. The result was that we got the building that we really wanted.’ Being architect to LRC, working with a committee dominated by barristers, was more exacting than entering all seven events at the Olympics, he said later.
The building that reopened in June 1972 was an efficient low-maintenance shell. The boatshed had a workshop, a tank, a sloping anti-flood floor and racks for 100 boats. The first floor had a new lease of life, with a captain’s room, the Fairbairn Room, and a new kitchen. ‘No other club that I know in the country will have such facilities or so much space,’ Crosse said. ‘My prediction is that the cash turnover at the bar will soar. Beyond this, the club could do greatly increased business in letting out its clubroom and catering facilities.’ His message to the members was that ‘if you want carpets and polished floors, you must look after them yourselves and see to it that an impossible burden is not put on the steward and his wife.’
Incidentally, Crosse was not the only Feilden & Mawson connection at London RC. Barry Banyard was the firm’s interior designer when he joined the club in 1961, and later became head of interior design at Great Yarmouth college of art. Banyard, who died in 2014, was a great eccentric. He sported an enormous florid moustache and was a resident on the top floor, where he transformed his room into a wondrous chamber of modern living. He also tried his hand at sculling, with some success. He drove an old Bentley, a marque popular also with Simon Crosse.
One of Crosse’s commissions was to restore the Italianate external facade of F W Tasker’s 1877 St Patrick catholic church at Green Bank, Wapping. Notable buildings include Queen Elizabeth Close, an award-winning development of sheltered flats inside the wall of Norwich cathedral’s precinct. F&M were heavily involved in the new University of East Anglia (UEA), and Crosse designed the university’s chaplaincy, a concrete-faced blockhouse projecting into the central piazza with a flight of steps rising to a second floor that became the most used outdoor meeting place on campus.
Simon built himself a lovely house in the Cathedral Close, with the River Yare flowing past the garden where he could launch his sculling boat and row to his office. He also loved sailing and the Norfolk Broads, being owner of an Edwardian Broads sloop that he had restored. Kit Routledge, a former colleague, recalls a day out on the Swan (whose dinghy was called Cygnet) with skipper Simon, his young family, his cat and a large litter of kittens. ‘As a skipper he did a lot of shouting.’
Simon Crosse was a Life member and his last visit to the Club was on the occasion of a reception on 3rd October 2007 to mark the completion of the next 2005-07 development at the clubhouse. He was doubtless delighted to see the work that had been done and will have followed, with equal professional interest, the recent construction of the Coni Gym.
