My friend and former colleague Ian Leith, who has died aged 75, was a long-serving acquisitions officer with the Historic England Archive. Ian’s knowledge of the archive’s collections, many of which he was responsible for acquiring over a career spanning 47 years, was exceptional.
Researchers interested in unearthing little-known treasures in uncatalogued collections knew to contact Ian, who had extraordinary powers of recall. He is acknowledged in many books produced over the last 40 years, including numerous volumes in The Buildings of England’s Pevsner Architectural Guides series and Historic England’s own publications.
Born in Belfast, Ian was the eldest of the five children of Nan (nee McClure), a teacher, and Desmond Leith, a GP working in Northern Ireland during the early years of the NHS. Later Desmond moved into a research and development role for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, a job that took him and the family to Switzerland, Kenya, Belgium and Canada.
Ian obtained a BA in history and English literature at Trent University, Ontario, before returning to the UK. In 1973 he started work with the National Buildings Record. Established as an independent body in London in 1941, the NBR collected records of buildings and sites at risk of damage during and after the second world war. In 1963 it became part of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME), an inventory of ancient and historical monuments in England, and both merged with English Heritage in 1999, with the archive becoming part of Historic England in 2015. Of national importance, the archive now has over 12 million items and a number of major collections covering archaeology, architecture and local history.
Ian relocated to Wiltshire in 1994 following the transfer of the archive to Swindon. There he continued his work researching potential photographic acquisitions to plug gaps in the organisation’s collections. Among many treasures he was instrumental in acquiring were a series of PH Delamotte prints, about which he wrote the book Delamotte’s Crystal Palace (2005). His office overflowed with reference books and archive items and was the scene of many long, animated conversations about buildings and photography until his retirement in 2020.
Professionally, Ian will be remembered as an advocate for the contribution of historic photographs to the study of buildings and places. He also maintained a lifelong interest in public sculpture and was a founding trustee of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA), established in 1991 to campaign for the protection and recording of sculpture in public places. He was a member of the editorial board of the Sculpture Journal and instrumental in establishing the PMSA’s landmark National Recording project.
Ian was a private person, an excellent cook and epicurean. After several years of increasingly debilitating ill health, he died of blood cancer.
He is survived by his wife Tesni Daniel, whom he met in London in 1988 and married in 1996, and by his siblings, Linda, Brian, Sheelagh and Mandy.
