Remembering the man who helped shape modern Chichester

County Hall and its Architect C G Stillman is available £5 at County Record Office in Chichester.

It comes from Tim Hudson: “My career was as a local historian but before that I was an architectural historian and latterly I have been working on the revision of Pevsner's Buildings of England for West Sussex, and arising out of that I became interested in the work of the county architect C G Stillman particularly on his work on County Hall as his building.

“He was moderately well known. He does have an item in the new Dictionary of National Biography. He was born in Reading and he worked mostly in the south of England. He spent 15 to 16 years in Chichester between 1931 and 1945 as county architect. He was appointed quite young and almost the first thing he did was design a new building for the County Hall. Before that it had been in Edes House for some time and in offices scattered around the town. The idea was that everything would be in the same place. It is something that at that point quite a lot of other counties were doing, building their big county halls.

“In Chichester there was a certain amount of worry about the cost as you might expect but generally it has had a good press over the years particularly in terms of its siting at the back of Edes House and the lawns in front of it. It comes over very well. County Hall was very much in tune with the style at the time which was neo-Georgian, the style of the 18th century reworked for the 20th century, and it is a building that relates very well to Edes House in that style. It's sympathetically done. Pevsner in his original Buildings of England commented about how it sits neatly into the town particularly in relation to Edes House. It was very well built and very solidly built. It is a good example but the difficulty from my research was that there was not a lot of documentation. You'd expect a county architect to have had considerable documentation and files but they do not seem to survive at the County Record Office. He may well have had the option to take them with him when he went to London in 1945.”

Tim says there is a general article on Stillman in the Dictionary of National Biography. He served in the First World War and died in 1968 while on holiday in Dubrovnik. He was cremated in Brighton.

“After he had been in London for a time he retired to come back and live in Sussex and lived in Bognor. We've got a nice photograph of him which has survived from his grandson which shows him in Home Guard uniform. He was still in Chichester during the Second World War.

“In Chichester he built other buildings including the courthouse in Southgate and also the early buildings of St Richard’s Hospital and some other buildings around in other parts of the county. There is also the courthouse in Midhurst. I don't think anybody has probably really heard of his name now but he was pretty well known at the time, but fortunately the majority of his buildings do survive.”

Chichester Local History Society was founded in 1985 and meets on the second Wednesday of each month except for July and August. Meetings are generally held at New Park Community Centre, New Park Road, Chichester, to hear lectures on subjects of interest to Chichester residents and historians. New members and visitors are always welcome.