Obituary: Sir Nicholas Grimshaw

That adventure was the Eden Project, the conversion of a Cornish clay pit into a series of giant bubbles containing indoor rainforests and other environments from around the world, that has so far attracted 24 million visitors and contributed an estimated £2.2bn to the local economy. For Grimshaw, it was a dream commission (and one for which he was eventually paid) bringing together romantic visions and technical ingenuity. It was a pivotal moment in a career that progressed from out-of-town industrial buildings to landmarks in major cities. He was also, from 2004 to 2011, a transformative president of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Art and science were in his genes. His father, who died when he was young, was one of a family of engineers. His mother and grandmother, who jointly raised him, were artists. He studied in the 1960s at the Architectural Association in London, where he was taught by a young Richard Rogers and the inspirational Peter Cook. It was “the high noon of a kind of hippiedom”, says a former colleague of Grimshaw’s, when students were encouraged to dream up futuristic cities inspired by science fiction and pop art.

Grimshaw worked in the architects’ department of the London Council, then a destination for aspiring designers, but together with another young employee, Terry Farrell, he grew dissatisfied with its frustrating organisation. They would start a practice that eventually dissolved in 1980. An early work was a low-cost tower of apartments, now listed, next to Regent’s Park, with corrugated aluminium cladding and horizontal windows derived from those used on buses. It was built for a co-ownership group that the architects and their friends had set up.

In the 1980s he designed projects where the challenge was to “squeeze the most out of very tight budgets”, as an old associate puts it, including a striking masted ice rink in Oxford, a Sainsbury’s Homebase, and printworks for the Financial Times in London’s Docklands, designed and built in a mere nine months, through whose glass wall passing drivers could see the pink paper of tomorrow’s newspaper whirring through the presses.

Then came the project that would be his personal favourite, the International Terminal at Waterloo Station, which from 1994 to 2007 was the point of arrival and departure for Eurostar trains. It is a “noble curve”, as his fellow architect Norman Foster put it, 400 metres long, inspired by the soaring vaults of Victorian railway stations, which wiggles and narrows to fit the available site. This commission was a remarkable leap in scale for a practice whose technology consisted of two electric typewriters and a fax machine. Although he experienced the rises and falls typical of the architecture business, Grimshaw never looked back.

After the Eden Project, he went on to design the magnificent Southern Cross Station in Melbourne, Australia and, although the project was completed after he stepped back from the practice, the Stirling Prize-winning stations for the Elizabeth Line in London. The company that bears his name now employs 600 people and has eight studios in cities around the world.

Sculptor Antony Gormley, who got to know Grimshaw at the Royal Academy, said of the architect: “He used engineering solutions not just to lift weight but lift the spirits as well.” He was an enthusiast, with an “absolutely omnivorous interest in everything”. He loved sailing and was passionate about music and was the patron of a music festival near his weekend house in Norfolk. Gormley describes the house itself, a conversion of an old barn with ship-like construction, as “bonkers but brilliant”. It was “wonderful to feel that there was still a boy in him even in his 80s”, says the artist.

Lean, with big round glasses and a perennial flop of hair, Grimshaw had “the air of a boffin inventor”, according to Andrew Whalley, who started working with him in the 1980s and is now the chair of the Grimshaw practice. But he also had a talent for organisation and detail. Charles Saumarez Smith, who became chief executive of the Royal Academy when Grimshaw was president, recalls how the architect took over a “problematic” situation, when a “lot of donors thought it was a basket case”, because of a series of public rows between its exhibitions secretary and its management.

Grimshaw would, says Saumarez Smith, “focus on a small number of things he wanted to achieve, and then fix them quietly and effectively … Nick was very good with people, incredibly straight, very fair and rather generous”. He brought the same qualities to running his practice, open to ideas from anyone. He was also a devoted family man to his wife, Lavinia, and their daughters, Chloe and Isabel.

Grimshaw’s buildings combined big ideas with relentlessly worked-out details. They were most successful when there was an obvious challenge that ingenuity could solve, as at Waterloo and the Eden Project, achieved in close collaboration with the best engineers of his time. He was someone who thought with his hands, who loved drawing and making. An important part of his legacy is the Grimshaw Foundation, which works with a diverse range of young people addressing gender, social and economic equity – helping them navigate a creative career path.

Nicholas Grimshaw, architect, was born on 9 October 1939 and died on 14 September 2025, aged 85

Photograph by Rick Roxburgh