Les Canham Retiring

‘You draw what you want, and I will make it work!’

This month, our highly valued senior associate Les Canham will be retiring from the practice. He will be sorely missed, not only for his work but also as a friend and colleague of everyone in the office.

Les is one of a small handful of people who are responsible for the beauty and success of both my and my father’s buildings. I found him an invaluable assistant, he would say ‘You draw what you want, and I will make it work!’ He is part of a rare breed with a deep understanding of construction and the building regulations which he used in a way that did not compromise my designs.

Proudly not a qualified architect, he sees himself as a technician, focusing on getting the building drawn and built, and though he did not have RIBA written after his name, he had the rare and more prestigious accolade of having a racehourse named after him by a grateful client. The racing career of ‘Can Do Les’ sadly did not win the Grand National or anything else, but his name is a testament to Les’s ‘can do’ approach to the trials and tribulations of building, although, this was, in truth, used slightly ironically as he had to tell me and an ambitious client that some things ‘could not’ be done.

When Les drew anything, you knew it was right. Back in the 1990s, a stone spiral staircase arrived on site and when built it was discovered that the head room was too low to be used, Les was called in to adapt the drawings to make it work. In this and numerous other cases, he was the cavalry coming in at the end of the Western to take the problems away.

Les was born and brought up at the Royal Hospital School in Holbrook, Suffolk, a site which is often seen as the last chapter of traditional architecture before everything went wrong. His father worked as a lab technician from whom he inherited his ability to solve technical problems. He started working for my father back in 1981 as a teenager. Moustached and driving a Ford Capri, this all proved too much for the office receptionist Rachel, who he later married and started a family. Their son Matt came a few years later and he now, grown up, is a successful industrial designer, so the design gene continued into another generation.

Having worked in the same room as him for many years both at my father’s office and my own, I know him incredibly well. He has a reputation of having an Eeyore personality, and he certainly does not see himself at the very button on Fortune’s cap, but he is good company and enjoys a joke at his own expense. When he unwrapped a Rastafarian  string vest at the office Secret Santa, he proceeded to strip to the waist and don his new outfit to much hilarity.

Les’s career has been book ended by two of the great classical buildings of modern times. One of the first projects he worked on for my father was Henbury Hall, a commission that was later taken on and completed to great effect by Julian Bicknell. His final building was a similar mini-Rotunda recently completed in Dorset. This commission was a remarkable project and one that would be hard to beat and so decided to go out on a high, exactly forty-five years after starting with my father.

Though Les will have retired we have arranged for him to come in on ad hoc basis as and when we need him. I only hope he does not come in wearing his rasta string vest