Peter Tabori 1940-2023
The Whittington Estate (Highgate New Town), Camden
James Dunnett remembers the architect who spent much of his career at the London Borough of Camden
I arrived in Camden’s Department of Architecture in 1975 from Ernö Goldfinger’s office advised by his Associate Mira Molis that ‘we have a friend there’ – Peter Tabori. Peter had worked for his Hungarian compatriot for two separate years – one at the end of his first year at the Regent Street Polytechnic (when, characteristically, he apparently needed a break due to a broken romantic relationship), and for his ‘year out’. I was not allocated on arrival to the glamorous Neave Brown Group, by then working primarily on the giant Alexandra Road project, but to the more down-to-earth Peter Clapp Group on the other side of the staircase in the Holborn Town Hall extension. Peter Tabori, again characteristically, sat on the Neave side of the staircase of which I assumed he was a member. But he was actually part of the Clapp group – so not for the last time he sat alone. Peter had come to England with his parents in 1956 aged 16, refugees from the Russian invasion of Hungary, and his spoken English always retained a continental flavour, as did his mental make-up, contributing to his comparative isolation. His mother had been an opera singer in the Staatsoper in Vienna, divorced from his natural father, a nuclear physicist, and his stepfather had been – I think – Hungarian cultural attaché in Vienna. Peter was engaged with the political struggles of his country and retained an informed political and cultural outlook all his life - and a very serious approach to architecture.
Eventually Peter moved over to ‘our side’ of the staircase and I began to get to know him better. We had Goldfinger to talk about, and the names of Neave Brown, Richard Rogers and Denys Lasdun also frequently figured in his conversation. Neave had been a teacher of his at the Poly and had brought him to Camden, Rogers had been a teacher there too (and Peter said he had contributed to the drawings for the Pompidou Centre competition), and for Lasdun he had both worked and been a black belt judo partner. Peter had first visited the UK as part of an athletics team and had a terrific physique – he later used to wipe the floor with me at squash. Jim Stirling too was somewhere in his background and I remember once meeting Leon Krier at a party in Peter’s marital home in Montenotte Road in Crouch End shared with his glamorous Austrian wife Angelika, who had been a model, and their three children. It abutted fields overlooked by Alexandra Palace, and Peter said he could walk from it through woods to Highgate station.
By the time I got to know Peter the peak of his built career had in fact already passed. The design of Highgate New Town and the Polygon Estates, with their rigorous Modern cross-wall geometry, was behind him and he was working on studies to build new homes over railway lines in Camden, perceived as the only option not requiring demolition of the existing. But none of those was ever built – ironically, the best option was found too late to have been Alexandra Road itself. Subsequently he designed the little Mill Lane/Solent Road corner site, an ingenious and charming design which did get built after some massaging by Peter Collins during the first of Peter Tabori’s increasingly frequent absences due to health or for other not-fully-understood reasons. Peter Clapp and Peter Tabori did not view the world from the same angle and the relationship steadily became unworkable. The grand new-build projects for which Peter Tabori had been hired by Camden were no longer, post-Thatcher, on the agenda, the focus now being on post-war estates modernisation, and Peter gradually backed away.
At some point there was a motor accident in which his car was rammed from behind by a police car chasing another, and Peter suffered severe whiplash injury compounding a nerve problem that he already had, which severely reduced his ability to hold and manipulate a Rotring pen. Nevertheless he seemed to make frequent trips abroad, especially to Germany, to work on projects the nature of which one never learned. Peter always held his cards close to chest, a habit that had perhaps been inculcated by his early years in Hungary. By this time too he had separated from Angelika for other relationships. I continued to see him fairly regularly, however, partly to garner information about the Hungarian background that might be useful for my slowly-evolving Goldfinger research (Peter translated for me the little Hungarian book about him), but partly also to talk about architecture generally. In due course he inherited his mother’s house in Gayton Road, Hampstead, which he divided into several units, living on the lowest floor himself, and finally, his mobility now considerably impaired by Parkinsons and other ailments, he moved into a ground floor flat in Highpoint 1. Here the products of his well-developed graphic skills lined the walls and a large chess board with complex layout in place provided the focus for the room – displaying the strong intellectual and visual sides of his nature. It was a combination that I miss and will continue to do so.