Sidney Colwyn Foulkes : The Architecture of a Reluctant Modernist

This is the first study of the work of architect Sidney Colwyn Foulkes (1884–1971), one of Britain’s most significant regional architects. His design work included schools, shops, churches and church halls, town halls, hospitals, cinemas, private houses and public housing schemes. Foulkes made a major contribution to buildings in his hometown of Colwyn Bay and its surrounds, and his influence extended across Wales and beyond. The present study explores Foulkes’s projects broadly by type, illustrating many of them with original photographs, suggesting that his greatest achievements were post-war housing schemes and his involvement in the early field of industrial landscaping in sensitive areas of natural beauty. The book traces how, far removed from the metropolis like so many regional architects, Foulkes had to fight to produce good, ordinary architecture at a time of intense cultural and political change to define an architecture for the modern age.