The English firm of Llewelyn-Davies Weeks Forestier-Walker & Bor, formed in London in 1960, is best known for the master planning of the new town of Milton Keynes and for a series of hospital buildings and complexes, some so extensive that they can be analysed in urban terms.

Less known is the fact that the expatriate New Zealand architect Bruce Rotherham (1926-2004) worked at Llewelyn-Davies Weeks Forestier-Walker & Bor for much of the 1960s and 1970s. Rotherham is celebrated in New Zealand for his role in the Architectural Group, the Group Construction Co. and Group Architects, and for the house he designed and built for himself and his young family in the Auckland suburb of Stanley Bay in the early 1950s. He left the Group in 1952, and left New Zealand in 1955. He settled in London, where he remarried and had the bulk of his career. Little has been written about his British work.

This paper explores Rotherham’s time in the reputable London office of Llewelyn-Davies Weeks Forestier-Walker & Bor. It has three aims: (i) to identify the key projects on which Rotherham worked while in the office; (ii) to establish whether or not these projects were consistent with his declared interest in housing; and (iii) on the basis of claims made by British architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham in 1968, to consider the projects within the framework of Britain’s post-World War II Townscape movement. Townscape had its origins in eighteenth-century landscape design and the Picturesque movement, yet was also both distinctly modern and distinctly urban.

The paper shows that Rotherham was an important figure in what was a large and multi-disciplinary office, and that his work for the firm included commercial buildings as well as contributions to new towns and town centres. It was within the firm’s new towns and town centres that he was given opportunities to work on housing. The paper supports Banham’s suggestion that some of the firm’s work accorded with Townscape and Picturesque principles. More specifically, it shows that Rotherham both maintained an interest in pure geometries and also worked on buildings and projects that were characterised by asymmetry and irregularity, by varied and tactile material palettes, and by the making of explicit references to urban sites and contexts. The scale, complexity and recurrent use of brick and concrete all extend Rotherham’s established reputation as a designer of detached, timber houses.