Robert Hurd

He came to Scotland in 1930 and worked at the Edinburgh College of Art for two years as assistant to the architect and planner Frank Mears.

He was an early and highly respected conservation architect and wrote and broadcast on Scottish architecture, planning and reconstruction.

[7] In the same year he began campaigning to save historic buildings, his first coup being to temporarily rescue Tailors Hall on the Cowgate from demolition.

Although Hurd was declared unfit for overseas service, he served as an officer in the Royal Engineers (1940–46) and was put in charge of removing Edinburgh's cast-iron railings for the war effort.

His only noteworthy project of contemporary rather than historic idiom is a scheme of modernist flats at Ravelston Gardens, Edinburgh.

[citation needed] Hurd died whilst on holiday in Switzerland, but his body was flown home and his was the last full interment within the otherwise closed-to-burial Canongate Kirkyard.

[citation needed] A pencil sketch of Hurd by Antony Wolffe is in the collection of National Galleries of Scotland.