On 14th March 2025, Leeds Civic Trust will unveil a blue plaque to honour Professor Patrick Nuttgens CBE. Tickets are free but limited. Click here for information on the unveiling.
Further Information on Professor Patrick Nuttgens, CBE:
The son of migrants, Kathleen, a mathematician, and Jozef, a stained glass artist, Patrick Nuttgens was born in Buckinghamshire in 1930 and attended school in Leicester. He later studied architecture and painting at Edinburgh College of Art and at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1953 and completed his PhD in 1959. While he was at the University of Edinburgh, Nuttgens met Bridget Badenoch (known as ‘Biddy’), an English literature student. The couple married in 1954 and had nine children. Biddy went on to become actively involved in his multi-faceted career.
Nuttgens’ early career took him from architecture to academia, first as lecturer at the department of architecture at the University of Edinburgh, and then as the first department head of the University of York, running its Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies. He became professor of architecture at York university in 1968.
In 1969, he was appointed the first director of the Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University), a role he held for two decades and considered his greatest legacy. As part of the first group of polytechnic directors, he was at the heart of planning the polytechnic experiment in English higher education. Leeds Polytechnic presented Nuttgens with the opportunity to champion vocational education and training: this would be practical and experience-based education, rather than traditional theory-based. He is quoted: “Doing, making and organising are fundamental activities, and they are what a polytechnic is all about” (Obituary, Guardian, 17 March 2004). A passionate educator, Nuttgens believed that students should leave vocational education able not only to do the things they had been trained to do but also with the transferable skills for life and for many other jobs. While the present-day Leeds Beckett University stands as his greatest legacy, he did not welcome the decision in 1992 to absorb polytechnics into the university system. He firmly believed in the need for and work of the polytechnics and vocational education.
Nuttgens was also a prolific broadcaster, making TV programmes for the BBC on architecture, housing, planning, and Leeds. He was among the first, if not the first broadcaster to do the presenter-led documentary, a common format today whereby the presenter and writer as expert is up front, walking and talking to camera. In one such programme, In Search of the City (1973), Nuttgens offers a personal insight into the history and development of Leeds as an urban environment covering migration, industry, housing, planning and transport. His radio work included being a member of the Radio 4 Round Britain Quiz team and as participant in Any Questions and A Word in Edgeways.
Disabled with polio from the age of 12, Nuttgens walked aided by splints and sticks, and by the 1980s he was using a wheelchair. In 1989 he produced a series for BBC Leeds The Home Front: housing the people 1840-1990, an investigation into the UK’s housing policies. This was the first UK network factual series not about disability presented by a disabled person in a wheelchair. In the series there was only one reference to Nuttgens’ disability which was when he visited an accessible housing scheme.
Nuttgens’ role at the BBC was not purely confined to broadcasting. Between 1970 and 1975, he was Chairman of the BBC Northern Advisory Council.
A prolific writer as well as broadcaster, Nuttgens wrote numerous books including two architecture standards, Understanding Modern Architecture (1988) and The Story of Architecture (1983, 1997). Titles reflecting his beliefs on vocational education include What Should We Teach and How We Should Teach It (1988), and an autobiography The Art of Learning: A personal journey (2000). Other books include Leeds: The Back to Front, Inside-out, Upside-down City (1979) and The History of York: From Earliest Times to the Year 2000 (2007).
Professor Nuttgens was awarded honorary doctorates from many universities and the CBE in 1983.
Liz Yeomans, Leeds Civic Trust volunteer.
