Between 1936 and 1941 he attended the independent Repton School in south Derbyshire, where he became head boy and excelled at drawing.

In 1942 he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and met his wife in Canada, when training to be a Fleet Air Arm pilot.

He served as a fighter pilot until 1945 but was invalided out of service, having crashed while attempting to land on a moving aircraft carrier in the Baltic Sea.

He held life memberships of the National Trust, the Victorian Society and Reform Club and took an interest in Liberal politics.

Thin shell concrete roofs were invented in Germany around the 1920s, as a means of achieving large spans with limited materials and at low cost.

The strength of the roof lies in its shape, and the way it carries the loads by the forces exerted in the planes of the shell, rather than by the weight of their materials.

One of the first engineers to specialise in concrete shell techniques in Britain was the German refugee of Hungarian-Jewish origin, Kalman Hajnal-Kónyi, who arrived in London in 1936, and who worked with Sam Scorer.

Félix Candela in Mexico was experimenting with ‘anticlastic’ or shells with double curvatures of opposing convexity and concavity, from which the hyperbolic paraboloid emerged.