Percy Edwin Alan Johnson-Marshall was born on 21 January 1915 in Ajmer, India, the younger son of Felix William Norman Johnson-Marshall, a civil servant of Scottish descent who administered the salt trade, and his wife Kate Jane Little, and brother of Stirrat Andrew William Johnson-Marshall. His early childhood was spent in various areas of India as well as in Baghdad, where the family was taken because of his parents’ work. He subsequently attended Queen Elizabeth School, Kirby Lonsdale, Cumbria.
From 1930-35 Johnson-Marshall studied architecture at the University of Liverpool, at that time under the influential directorship of Lionel Budden, with Charles Reilly overseeing the architecture programme and Patrick Abercromby that of town planning. In 1933 he made a study tour in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. He gained the RIBA Distinction in town planning and was an Associate Member of the Town Planning Institute. He was elected ARIBA in 1938, proposed by Lionel Budden, Ernest Marshall and Edward R T Cole.
After graduating from Liverpool, he took a post as architectural assistant with Ivor Davies, moving the following year to an assistant post with Middlesex County Council. From 1937-38 he worked for Willesden Borough Council and subsequently for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and various local authorities, including Coventry (where he became the protégé of Donald Gibson) and on the Hertfordshire schools programme. This was a time of personal tragedy for him, as he lost his first wife and their unborn child during the Blitz. He was mobilised into the Royal Engineers, and spent most of the war in India, reaching the rank of major. It was in Darjeeling that he met his second wife, April, an Anglo-Argentinian who was serving as a nurse. They married in Calcutta.
In 1949 Johnson-Marshall was brought in by Arthur Ling and Robert Matthew to head the Reconstruction group at the London County Council (LCC), one of the Planning Division’s four new groups, with the remit of planning the rebuilding of bombed areas. By 1951 Johnson-Marshall had risen to take charge of the programme of planning-led Comprehensive Development Areas. The best-known of these are Lansbury and St Anne’s, Stepney/Poplar, the South Bank and the Barbican, and Tower Hill.
Johnson-Marshall was a committed communist and opposed the grand wartime Modernist tabula rasa plans from a Socialist Realist perspective, which combined grand boulevards and landmark buildings with elements of ‘people’s vernacular’. With his communist convictions, Percy joined in the late 1940s/early 1950s heated debates of public versus private architecture/planning: in December 1949 he took part in a Third Programme radio debate against Frederick Gibberd, where he accused large private architectural practices of being ‘a great menace to good architecture’, and in 1952 was involved in organising a series of articles on the theme of Public Architecture, published in the Architect’s Journal and prepared by guest editors Robert Matthew, Donald Gibson, Stirrat Johnson-Marshall and Robert Gardner-Medwin. These articles also highlighted the growing tension between architects and planners. Johnson-Marshall was firmly in the pro-planning camp, and may have been partially motivated by sibling rivalry with his architect brother, Stirrat, which was exacerbated by the fact that their elderly mother had to live for 15 years in Percy’s house, despite his large family and relative poverty.
After an unsuccessful 1957 application to become chief architect-planner of Cumbernauld, Johnson-Marshall moved from London to Edinburgh in 1959 to take up the post of senior lecturer for planning at Robert Matthew’s new Edinburgh University architecture department and was awarded the Ford Foundation travel grant during the subsequent session. Although it soon became clear that Johnson-Marshall had little teaching experience, he brought a great deal of enthusiasm to the role and in 1960 he established a civic design diploma course. He also became temporary Director of Edinburgh University’s Housing Research Unit for four years from 1961, consultant planner for the Edinburgh University redevelopment from 1961/62, and stood in for Robert Matthew as head of department in 1962-4, during the latter’s RIBA presidency. Johnson-Marshall was also involved in the setting up of the new Edinburgh University Planning Research Unit (1963) and the Department of Urban Design and Regional Planning (1967). From the late 1960s he was Edinburgh University’s external examiner to Khartoum University. In 1965 Percy’s book ‘Rebuilding Cities’ was published, described by Robert Matthew as ‘Percy’s great work’.
As well as his university post, Johnson-Marshall also set up his own planning consultancy in 1960, Percy Johnson-Marshall & Associates, having formed an agreement with Robert Matthew who shut down the small planning arm of Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall & Associates’ Edinburgh office and transferred the staff to Percy, along with a healthy dowry of existing projects. Together, Matthew and Johnson-Marshall were responsible for the Lothian Regional Plan, including Livingston New Town, as well as for the Grangemouth/Falkirk Plan and the Central Borders Plan. When the Johnson-Marshall family moved to Edinburgh in 1959, Matthew had also provided Percy, his wife, April, and their seven children with a large home (Bella Vista) in the picturesque Edinburgh suburb of Duddingston. This home was also used as the base for his practice, and Percy eventually bought it outright in 1967.
As the fifth planning consultant to Edinburgh University, he prepared an extensive development plan to enable the university to expand within the city. This was eventually halted by conservationists in the early 1970s, but not before the plans for Bristo Square had been carried out. By the 1970s Percy was engaged in Edinburgh conservation work. He was invited in 1972 to be a consultant on human settlements for the United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm, and was involved in an ad hoc Habitat Committee of the Joint Standing Committee of Commonwealth Associations from 1974, first as deputy to Robert Matthew and then taking over as chairman after the latter’s death in 1975. In the latter year he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. From this time he was also the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council’s ‘No. 1 professional’ until around 1989 when his health began to decline. He retired from Edinburgh University earlier, in 1985.
Johnson-Marshall lived at his Bella Vista home until his death on Wednesday 14 July 1993. He has been described by Arnold Hendry as a ‘slightly woolly headed, delightful person, very sociable, who spoke in chromatic chords and got on terribly well with everybody’. ‘He and his wife were marvellously kind to overseas students – you’d go over to Bella Vista for lunch on Sunday, all these people from different countries would troop in, and April would say, ‘Who are all these people, Percy?’ He’d reply, ‘They’re postgrads – I asked them for tea’ and she’d say, ‘You might have asked me!’, while in Maurice Lee’s opinion, Johnson-Marshall ‘had an unadulteratedly universal outlook, prepared to be friends with anybody, with no exclusion of race, colour or politics. For Percy, you didn’t have to be a communist to be his friend.’