Hal Currey

Hal Currey's distinguished career as an architect is one thing for which he doesn't have Bedales to thank, having been told by a careers advisor at school that such a possibility would be remote without the right maths or physics qualifications. In most other areas, though, Hal retains his affection for Bedales in a way that is especially evident in his enduringly strong friendships with many of his contemporaries. Of some of his professional achievements, Hal observes: “If something seemed like a good idea, we ran with it, which is probably quite a Bedalian habit”.

“People sometimes think of Bedales as a laissez-faire institution but I reckon that St. Christopher's, Letchworth was in a different league in that respect,” Hal Currey reflects. “That was a school where the staff really did leave us to our own devices a lot of the time and the consequences were often all too predictable! Eventually my parents took the view that I was drifting too much and began the hunt for a more suitable alternative.”

The subsequent educational tour included its share of traditional public schools. “I can't say that they appealed much to me,” Hal observes. “I couldn't understand Latin or rugby nor was I especially interested in them.” There was, however, a more attractive possibility, one to which Hal's family had tangential connections. “It seems that both Patrick Nobes and Alastair Langlands had at one stage in their careers taught in Hertfordshire and I'm fairly sure that my parents therefore knew them slightly,” he explains. “That was how Bedales came into the picture; I went down for the two-day entrance process and started there the following autumn.”

His new environment was completely different from Hal’s previous educational experience. “The sheer mass of people at Bedales slightly overwhelmed me at first,” he admits. “It was much busier and more intense than anything I had known before. I suppose it took me about a term to settle in properly after a bit of home-sickness but I quickly found my tribe, a number of which were really talented in areas like music and art. That wasn’t quite me – I wasn't especially musical and I certainly didn't hang around the art-room.”

Although he admits to being “slightly badly behaved” at various points in his Bedalian mid-teens, Hal's indiscretions, such as they were, did not prevent him from getting involved in aspects of school life that particularly interested him. “Drama was my thing and various plays were often a part of my life,” he recalls. “The Real Inspector Hound was one, I remember, and later on, I produced something together with my friends Kate Summerscale and Andrew Ide.”

Among Bedales staff, Martin Box took pride of place as an influence on the course of Hal’s life. “I’d never thought of design as an interest before Bedales, even though our family home had been the result of a big conversion project,” he says. “Martin, who was the design brain that complemented David Butcher, the master craftsman, was always energetic and aware at the same time as being a calm and supportive presence. We were quite an able year; he recognised the fact and encouraged it, sometimes by taking us on studio trips to London – I particularly remember one visit to the Ford Motor Works in Dagenham.”

English and Geography, along with Design, were Hal's chosen A Level subjects. “John Batstone, although slightly terrifying at times, was someone from whom I learned so much,” he says. “It was because of him and Graham Banks that I went from ‘fairly hopeless’ to ‘not that bad’ at English, which was no mean feat on their part! Geography was a bit less successful. We were taught by Bert Perry and whatever his qualities as a geography teacher, he turned out to be much less efficient as a careers advisor, which was also within his remit at school.”

“Part of my design course had involved an architectural project at Portsmouth Cathedral with a couple of other friends, Julia Chance and Victoria Pike,” Hal continues. “I was therefore now aware of architecture as a potential career and mentioned this to Bert Perry, only to be told that I couldn't even think about it because I wasn't studying maths or physics. Well, maths, like art wasn't my forte, unlike some of my contemporaries, and I temporarily put architecture out of my mind.”

Instead Hal knuckled down to pass his exams. “Bedales was quite strong on teaching self-sufficiency to its students but there were some more organised aspects to the place that stuck with me,” he says. “I would say that I was somewhat instinctively lazy in those days but there seemed to be a collective will, which came from the students as much as the staff, that it was time to roll up our sleeves and get on with it. We all worked pretty hard, although the trick was to do so without apparently putting in too much effort.”

Initially, Hal secured a place at Manchester Design School to pursue a course that he did not much enjoy. “Leaving Bedales had come as a bit of a shock – I wasn’t exactly concerned about the future but I did feel a little rudderless for a while,” he acknowledges. “I spent most of my time at Manchester in the library, where I discovered that as I half-suspected at the time, Bert Perry had been completely wrong about architecture. I could pursue it, with or without maths, physics or art; my existing qualifications were good enough.”

Hal headed to what was then known as the Polytechnic of Central London to take his architecture degree, following up with a post-graduate diploma at UCL. “In between the degree and the diploma, I took a year out, during which I got a bit of work experience with an architectural practice run by another Old Bedalian, Matthew Priestman,” he explains. “It would also have been around this period that I went out to Singapore and Hong Kong, which is where I first saw the extraordinary HSBC building."

Duly inspired, Hal began his ‘career proper’ with the Richard Rogers Partnership. “We were all given a great deal of early responsibility there, made plenty of mistakes and later learned from them,” he says. “We worked hard and played hard in what was a massively productive phase of my life and I realised that it wasn’t totally necessary to have vast experience in order to do a good job. As youngsters, architects used to be able to learn their craft more quickly than a number of other traditional professions. Architecture has become a much more risk-aware profession these days, one in which nobody in their right mind would dare to entrust a building like the HSBC to a promising youngster.”

Hal believes that his generation of architects was among the lucky ones. “I’ve been practising at a time of huge change, a transition from traditional drawing board skills to the ever evolving tech revolution in architecture.  Today, everything is done on a computer. This brings many benefits, but in the quest for speed and efficiency, I hope the next generation of architects will have as much latitude – and time – as we did to explore, develop and question. We were part of a big cohort of young people who had room to manoeuvre and be innovative. Everyone had an opinion, sometimes even a counter-productive one. Prince Charles, as he then was, and his meddling in architecture back in the 1980s and 1990s actually ruined one or two careers.”

With friends and colleagues, Hal formed ACQ Architects in 2000, an enterprise that acquired two more partners a couple of years later and subsequently became FLACQ. “That was a slightly risky move, not least because there wasn’t a lot of business acumen between us at the time,” he reflects. “It was born out of youthful naivety but it went pretty well. If something seemed like a good idea, we ran with it, which is probably quite a Bedalian habit.”

In 2010, FLACQ was merged into the much larger Arup Associates, where Hal became a Director: “Arup’s a great engineering consultancy, one committed to making the world a better place and I knew the characters there pretty well. The problem for me turned out to be one of scale. We were so much smaller than Arup and after the merger, I found myself doing far too much management and not nearly enough project work, which is why I decided to go back to doing my own thing.”

Together with a few colleagues of long standing, Hal founded the appropriately named HAL Architects (www.halarchitects.co.uk) in 2015. “Management isn’t such a necessity now,” he says reassuringly. “I’ve worked with many of the people here for twenty-odd years and there are only a total of eight of us in any case. The idea is still to get stuck into an interesting mixture of small and large projects, mainly national in scope, although we have recently been working on developments in Athens and County Cork. It’s fair to say that these days my views on architecture are a bit different from those I might have held when I was starting out in the profession. I have a lot more time now, to give one example, for the historical and the importance of narrative or story-telling.”

Ask Hal about his future ambitions and prepare to receive a deliberately vague answer. “I much prefer to deal with the here and now rather than focus on what might lie ahead,” he says. “As a profession, architecture has often been its own worst enemy because it has constantly diminished its own sphere of influence. However, we have learned to adapt in order to survive and prosper and I would hope to keep applying what I’ve learned over the years in different ways, perhaps to something like housing in developing countries. I certainly shan’t retire – I’d be bored senseless.”

Although his career advice at Bedales might have left something to be desired, Hal’s connections with his old school are kept in good repair through a rock solid network of OB friendships. “I made friends for life there,” he agrees. “Julia Chance, Victoria Pike and I are godparents to each other’s children and there are plenty of others to whom I remain very close – people like John Ridding and Kate Summerscale."

Hal Currey was interviewed by James Fairweather in August 2023