Gordon Thomas Cullen was born in Bradford on 9 August 1914 and was educated in part as an artist, at the London School of Arts and Craft, and later as an architect, at the Regent Street Polytechnic. In 1933, Cullen joined the architectural office of Raymond McGrath and since then, he had a long and varied career, working in collaboration with several firms and local authorities as an illustrator, designer, and urban planner and consultant (Gosling 1996; Gosling et al. 1994).
Cullen gained international attention and recognition for his drawings and for his role as assistant editor of The Architectural Review (AR) in the 1950s and ‘60s, promoting the Townscape campaign together with Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Nikolaus Pevsner, and several other British scholars and architects (Aitchison 2012: 621–42).1 During his life, Cullen produced a tremendous number of sketches, drawings, notes, writings, diagrams, and photos (Montes Serrano, Alonso Rodríguez 2015).
All these materials are now held at the University of Westminster Gordon Cullen Archive and potentially demonstrate Cullen’s enormous effort in developing a complex urban theory, beyond his appointments as illustrator or consultant; as sustained in (Orillard 2012: 731), ‘More in-depth studies of Cullen’s archives […] need to be undertaken’.