Hermione Hobhouse, who has died aged 80, made a significant contribution to London, both as a historian of the city’s urban fabric and as a defender of its historic buildings in her roles as secretary of the Victorian Society and general editor of the Survey of London. Her first substantial book was Thomas Cubitt, Master Builder (1971), which examined the life and work of the man responsible for developing much of Camden Town, Islington and Bloomsbury, as well as Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for Queen Victoria, and Edward Blore’s new front of Buckingham Palace. This pioneering study of urban development won Hobhouse the Alice Davis Hitchcock medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.
Daughter of Arthur Hobhouse and his wife, Konradin (nee Huth Jackson), she was born at Hadspen House, in Castle Cary, Somerset, into a family long distinguished for Liberal politics and public service. She was proud of the fact that she was related to Emily Hobhouse, the social reformer who exposed the scandal of British concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer war. Her father played a key role in the establishment of national parks in England and Wales.
Hermione was educated at the private Cheltenham Ladies’ college and then at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she read modern history. Her sister said it was exposure to Victorian Gothic in Cheltenham and north Oxford that encouraged her architectural interests.
Hobhouse described herself as an urban historian and journalist. The journalism came at the beginning of her career when, after a short time in the US, she became a researcher with Granada Television, working on the programme Searchlight, and then became a freelance writer. In 1958 Hobhouse married the architect Harry Graham – a marriage later amicably dissolved – and managed to combine bringing up two small children in Pimlico with writing and research. Her first book was a history, The Ward of Cheap in the City of London (1959).
After Cubitt came Hobhouse’s most influential work, Lost London (1972), at a time of growing alarm at the redevelopment of much of the capital and other British cities. This handsome volume illustrated fine and interesting buildings, from Bloomsbury terraces to the aristocratic “private palaces”, churches and pubs, and major public structures like Sir John Soane’s Bank of England and the Euston Arch, all of which had disappeared, usually for no convincing reason. The introduction was a lucid and compelling argument for preservation. “London is threatened with the grim prospect of a Manhattan-like future,” she wrote, “of becoming a city of the very rich and the very poor, a city unattainable and increasingly unattractive to the middle classes and to the younger families with children to bring up …” She believed key historic buildings helped keep central London human in scale.
Hobhouse’s subsequent publications included A History of Regent Street (1975); the catalogue to the exhibition held at the Royal College of Art in 1983, Prince Albert, His Life and Work; and The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: A History of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (2002). This body is still the landlord of many of the museums and cultural institutions of South Kensington; Hobhouse was herself a commissioner and brought her deep interest in Victorian royal patronage to bear on the subject.
With her admirable credentials and contacts in building preservation, Hobhouse was a good choice to succeed Jane Fawcett as secretary of the Victorian Society in 1976. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who had done so much to make the society a conservation force to be reckoned with, also stepped down that year. Hobhouse had to deal with the snobberies and internal squabbles that can afflict voluntary amenity societies, with their prickly and awkward committee members, and there was tension between an old guard who cared most about classical houses and those who were enthusiastic about High Victorian Gothic.
Matters were not helped by Hobhouse’s often forthright manner and by the feeling that she attached excessive importance to social connections and encouraging the society’s royal patron. But the society continued to flourish on her watch, during which the Aesthetic Movement interiors of Linley Sambourne House, at 18 Stafford Terrace, Kensington, were saved and opened to the public.
Matthew Saunders, secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society, concluded that she was “a great, gutsy player in the history of the conservation movement, being absolutely fundamental in the heroic early years of the Victorian Society”.
In 1983 Hobhouse left the “Vic Soc” to become general editor of the Survey of London, founded in 1894 and dedicated to publishing volumes on the history of the capital’s monuments, area by area. The survey came under financial and bureaucratic threat with the abolition of the Greater London council in 1986, and Hobhouse fought vigorously to continue its secure, independent existence under the umbrella of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.
She also shook up the survey by diverting it from wealthy parts of London such as Kensington towards shabbier but no less interesting districts, although when she decided to investigate Poplar, even her considerable skill as a networker failed to persuade the London Docklands Development Corporation to offer financial support. She also promoted a monograph on County Hall, the grand Edwardian building rendered redundant by Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. However, this was not a happy period in Hobhouse’s career. Her talents were perhaps wasted as a civil servant and manager; she contributed little to the research and writing of the survey’s volumes and she retired in 1994.
Fortunately, there were other outlets for her energy. She was an active and useful member of the council of the National Trust and of the Royal Albert Hall. Earlier she had been much involved with the Clapham Society. She supported the Somerset Building Preservation Trust because she had a country home, Westcombe Stables, near Hadspen.
Hobhouse had lectured in architectural history at the Architectural Association in the 1980s and she continued to lecture, particularly in the US. When the Reform Club deigned to admit women, she was one of the first to join, and gave active support to restoring Charles Barry’s glorious Italianate palazzo in Pall Mall. She was appointed MBE in 1981 and was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Hobhouse could be intimidating, at once imperious and charming, and rather grand. There was often a twinkle in the eyes behind the big strong spectacles she habitually wore and she never lost her sense of humour; she was capable of great kindness and generosity. It was said of her that although she was an inveterate quarreller, she never harboured grudges. When I took an architectural group to Belgium, Hermione and the flamboyant, pigtailed Roderick Gradidge went off together to dine in a smart restaurant in Ostend rather than eat with the rest of us, even though the latter had been one of her loudest and most tiresome opponents in the Victorian Society.
She is survived by her son, Francis, and daughter, Harriet.
• Mary Hermione Hobhouse, architectural historian, born 2 February 1934; died 17 October 2014
• This obituary was amended on 2 December 2014. An earlier version stated that Hermione Hobhouse worked as a researcher at Granada on This Week. She worked at Granada on Searchlight; This Week was produced by Associated-Rediffusion.
