My father, John Smith, who has died aged 86, was an architectural historian and a specialist in church conservation who played a major role in preserving the beauty of the ancient town of Stamford in Lincolnshire.
He served on Stamford Civic Society’s executive committee for more than half a century and led the campaign for the town’s attractive Northfields area to become a conservation area, which it did in 2004.
For many years John was also the full-time curator of Stamford Museum, and took its activities into the town by producing award-winning trails and giving public lectures.
In 1993 he discovered the sole surviving piece of the Stamford Eleanor Cross. Of the 12 such monuments erected in the 1290s by Edward I in memory of his wife, three still stand, but the Stamford fragment is the only survival from any of the monuments’ upper shafts. Without his encyclopaedic knowledge and powers of identification, the stone might never have been recognised when it came to light, and could have been lost for ever. It is now on display in Stamford Library.
John wrote extensively about the 18th-century antiquarian William Stukeley, in whose Stamford garden the fragment was found. He also contributed the Lincolnshire chapter to the Blue Guide to English Churches and Chapels, as well as the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for the Stamford-based 19th-century terracotta manufacturer John Marriott Blashfield.
John was born in Bristol to Thomas, a cooper, and Lilian (nee Foster), a housewife. He went to Bristol Cathedral school before gaining a degree in history and education from the University of York.
From 1970 to 1974 he worked for the Church of England’s Council for the Care of Churches in London as a conservationist, a job that led to him being admitted to the Society of Antiquaries in 1974, aged only 34. In 1978 he was appointed curator of Stamford Museum by Lincolnshire county council, and remained in that post until his retirement in 1997.
Aside from his full-time work in Stamford, John served on the Peterborough Cathedral fabric committee, the Lincoln diocesan advisory committee and several national church committees, where his reports were appreciated as coming from an expert and a practical churchgoer.
He was also the driving force behind conserving the Stamford Mercury Archive, which holds copies of that local newspaper from as early as 1714. For his work on that project he was awarded the British Empire Medal.
In 1965 John married Dianne Howe, a teacher. She survives him, along with their children, Sophie and me, and grandsons Edward and Henry.
