Theodore Shealtiel Clerk, ARIBA, AMTPI, PGIA (4 September 1909 – 1965)[1] was an urban planner on the Gold Coast and the first formally trained, professionally certified Ghanaian architect.

[17][18][19][20] Among his sisters were Jane E. Clerk (1904 – 1999), a pioneering woman education administrator along with Matilda Johanna Clerk (1916 – 1984), the second Ghanaian female medical doctor and the first Ghanaian woman in any field to be awarded an academic merit scholarship for university education abroad.

[2][10] He also took draughtsmanship or technical drawing lessons at the then Achimota College Engineering School where he was taught by Charles Deakin.

[4] During the Easter term of 1941, Clerk was in Manchester on a vacation scholarship and later that summer in 1941, he undertook measuring work for the Scottish branch of the National Buildings Record.

[4] Theodore Clerk passed the intermediate examination in June 1941 and the final examination in June 1943, and was admitted as an associate (ARIBA) by the Royal Institute of British Architects on 1 October 1943, with Frank Charles Mears, Leslie Grahame Thomson and John Ross McKay listed as his proposers.

[4] In the summer of 1943, Clerk was awarded the Rutland Prize by the Royal Scottish Academy; an award which facilitated a critical study and tour of the Building Research Station in Garston and the Forest Products Research Lab in Princes Risborough, in addition to analysing the architecture, housing and town planning in London, Leeds, Liverpool and Coventry.

[4][29] By 1960, he had led the design, urban planning and development of the post-independent port city of Tema, a project commissioned by Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah.

[27][28] The British architects who worked under Clerk were D. C. Robinson, D. Gillies-Reyburn, N. R. Holman, M. J. Hirst, W. D. Ferguson, C. Kossack, G. Rochford, D. B.

[5][32] Theodore Clerk was also an external examiner at the Department of Architecture of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

[34] T. S. Clerk had previously served as the president of the erstwhile Gold Coast Society of Architects during the British colonial era.

On 20 March 1948, Theodore Clerk married Paulina Quist, a midwife from Christiansborg, Accra, at the Ebenezer Presbyterian Church, Osu.