Budden Lecture Theatre

Professor Lionel Bailey Budden (1887-1956) was born in 1887 in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby and attended Merchant Taylors' School in Crosby. He entered the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1905 gaining a BA in 1909 and an MA in 1910. Budden had been University of Liverpool Travelling Scholar in Architecture in 1909, and a student at the British School at Athens 1909-1912. He was first an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (ARIBA), later becoming a Fellow (FRIBA). He began teaching in the school in 1911 and quickly became Professor Charles Reilly's second-in-command being appointed an Associate Professor in 1924. The relationship between Reilly and Budden was an interesting one and whilst Reilly's extrovert and charismatic personality brought both himself and the school a good deal of attention, Budden was a more scholarly and low key figure - sometimes described as Reilly's able lieutenant. That is not to say he was not capable of seeing his mentor's faults. When Reilly published his autobiography in 1938, Budden was said to have wryly regarded the book as '...an amusing work of light fiction.' Following Reilly's early retirement in 1933, on health grounds, Professor Budden succeeded him as Roscoe Professor and remained in this post until his own retirement in 1952. Alongside his academic work he produced a number of buildings and memorials including the Liverpool and Birkenhead war memorials; extensions to the Liverpool University Students' Union and the 1933 extension to the School of Architecture, both in collaboration with Sir Charles Reilly and J.E. Marshall. In 1921 he had married Maud Fraser, later known as the creator of 'Curly Wee', a comic strip for children that was syndicated in a number of daily newspapers across the country, including the Liverpool Echo from 1937-1967. They had one son, the opera scholar Julian Budden, and one daughter.

Liverpool Cenotaph (Image by Keith Edkins, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Further Reading