Ralph Covell

Ralph was born in Lee, London, on 6 May 1911, the son of George William and Elsie Covell née Covington. The family lived in Lee High Road in the 1930s In late 1935 Ralph married Marguerite Latter but, after World War II, they had separated and both remarried. Covell married Lurline Stanley Knowles (1913–2005) in 1947.{{cite web |url=https://search.ancestry.co.uk/cgi-bin/sse.dll?_phsrc=KZz16&_phstart=successSource&usePUBJs=true&indiv=1&db=ONSDeath93&gss=angs-d&new=1&rank=1&msT=1&MS_AdvCB=1&gsfn=Lurline&gsfn_x=NN&gsln=Covell&gsln_x=1&MSAV=2&uidh=nq2&pcat=34&fh=0&h=14295108&recoff=&ml_rpos=1 |title= Lurline Stanley Covell |work=England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916–2007 ==Early career and military service==

Covell won the Ashpitel Prize in 1934 and was admitted ARIBA the following year. Covell founded an architectural practice in 1937 in Westminster where he worked until drafted into the Army. During this period he taught architecture at Croydon College of Art. During World War II he served with the Royal Engineers and was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant in 1940. He was evacuated from Dunkirk and later posted to Orkney where he was involved in the defences of Scapa Flow. After being recalled to London he was posted to the British Military Attaché in Washington, where he stayed until the end of the war. ==Post-war career==

After the war, he resumed architectural practice and was elected FRIBA in 1946. Matthews had also served in the Royal Engineers, seeing service in Italy and the Western Front. The Piccadilly Plaza is now considered by some to be an exemplar of modernist architecture. By 1960 the practice had become "Covell Matthews and Partners" and it expanded rapidly over the following decade, with Brian Falk and John Wheatley joining the practice during this period. Covell himself was elected FRIAS in 1965. However work in England continued including the residential estate at Bar Hill, Cambridge, and a pub in West Ham in 1968. Churches Covell undertook work on several churches, predominately on behalf of the Diocese of Southwark where the practice is associated with 23 church buildings. In 1956 Covell designed St Agnes, Kennington Park as a replacement of the original 1874-7 G. G. Scott church following its demolition due to bomb damage. Covell's church included a baptistry beneath a west gallery; north-east lady chapel; vestries and office/meeting room accessed via corridors and a hall complex all set in a small churchyard. A more modest project was the 1958 parish hall in Charlton, London on the site of the former Sundorne Mission Hall in Swallowfield Road, used by St Luke with Holy Trinity church. The church of St Matthew, Camberwell, was also a Covell-designed replacement for a previous church in Denmark Hill that had mostly been destroyed during a bombing raid on 26 September 1940. Building work commenced in 1959 and was completed in 1960. St. Katharine with St. Bartholomew Church, South Bermondsey, built in 1960, replaced a former church, bomb-damaged in 1940, and demolished in the late 1950s. Covell's design re-used the basement of the former church. It features zig-zag walls around the nave, a copper-covered nave roof, with abstract dalle de verre windows by W. T. Carter Shapland. Covell continued the use of dalle de verre and copper roofing at St Richard's Church, Ham, completed in 1966, the glass this time designed by Henry Haig. The church features a Star of David plan creating a hexagonal central space for worship and a matching hexagonal font. Henry Haig provided the dalle de verre windows. Covell continued the open interior and copper roof themes with the octagonal William Temple church, Abbey Wood, also built in 1966. Covell also designed the font and again commissioned glass from Shapland. The Church of St Laurence, Catford, built in 1967–8, repeated these themes: an octagonal church with peripheral vestries and other ancillary rooms and a pentagonal Lady Chapel also used as a community centre. Both have exposed reinforced concrete frames which continue over the church to form a corona and to a spirelet with a single bell over the chapel. The dalle de verre glass was Covell's third and final collaboration with Shapland. The church also features further dalle de verre work by W. T. Carter Shapland. The buildings were listed Grade II in 2010. Covell was a keen organist, playing at St Agnes, Kennington Park. He was also involved in the replacement of the organ in the Royal College of Organists in 1967. ==Retirement and death==

Covell retired in 1972. He died in Crowborough, East Sussex on 16 December 1988, aged 77. ==References==