Peter Campbell was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on 16 April 1937. A graduate of Victoria University, he worked in publishing before immigrating to London, England in 1960, where he became a distinguished designer, illustrator, editor and art critic, contributing for decades to BBC Publications and the London Review of Books. Peter Campbell died in London, England on 25 October 2011.
Designer, writer, editor and illustrator, Peter Campbell was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on 16 April 1937. His father, Arnold Campbell, was a prominent figure in New Zealand education, and Campbell later recalled growing up in a cultivated Wellington household shaped by books, prints, discussion and the hilly landscape around Pitt Street. In his autobiographical essay, ‘Memories of New Zealand’, he described a childhood centred on ‘reading, drawing, walking’ and on the steep terrain, timber houses, harbour views and changing light of Wellington, all of which remained vivid in his imagination and later reappeared in both his writing and images (Campbell 2011). Campbell studied at Victoria University in Wellington, graduating in philosophy in 1958, while also undertaking an intensive apprenticeship at the Wingfield Press under the poet, publisher and typographer, Denis Glover. There he trained as a typographer, compositor, designer and illustrator, absorbing the principle that paper, typography, binding and illustration were not secondary to a book’s literary content, but integral to the experience of reading. This understanding of the book as a complete physical and visual object became central to his later career.
In 1960 he married fellow student Winifred ‘Win’ Doogue, and the couple immigrated to England, though Campbell retained a strong attachment to New Zealand’s landscape, visual culture and intellectual traditions. After settling permanently in London, Campbell joined BBC Publications, where he worked for around 15 years. During the 1960s and 1970s, the BBC was publishing ambitious books connected with major television series, and Campbell became closely involved in designing and editing some of its most significant volumes. These included Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), Alistair Cooke’s America (1973) and David Attenborough’s Life on Earth (1979). Clark acknowledged him as ‘that prince of editors’ (Souhami 2011), while other collaborators valued his ability to combine visual judgement, editorial intelligence and typographic discipline. Campbell also wrote and illustrated children’s books, including The Koala Party (1972), The Koala Spring Clean (1972) and Harry’s Bee (1978),
In 1976 Campbell left the BBC to work as a freelance designer, editor and illustrator. His BBC connections led to further commissions from writers, publishers and cultural institutions. He designed books for authors including Kenneth Clark, Alan Bennett, Diana Souhami and Quentin Blake, and produced exhibition catalogues for major galleries, among them Francis Bacon: The Human Body (1998), and Goya: Drawings from His Private Albums (2001) for the Hayward Gallery, Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay for the Royal Academy of Arts (1998), and Titian for the National Gallery (2003). His design work also extended to magazines, including The Musical Times and, from its relaunch in 2000, New Left Review, whose typography and visual identity he carefully recast.
Campbell’s most enduring professional association was with the London Review of Books (LRB). Karl Miller, whom Campbell had known through the BBC and The Listener, invited him to design the new paper when it was founded in 1979. Campbell became its resident designer and art critic, shaping the appearance of the publication from its inception and contributing more than 300 articles. His writing was wide-ranging, observant and technically informed. Although he wrote chiefly on art, his subjects included architecture, photography, lettering, London trees, escalators, weeds, bicycles, bridges and everyday urban scenes. Mary-Kay Wilmers later wrote that few aspects of the world were beyond his curiosity (Wilmers 2011). A major selection of his essays appeared as At …: Writing, Mainly About Art, from the London Review of Books, published by Hyphen Press in 2009.
From the early 1990s, after Wilmers became editor, Campbell also began producing original cover illustrations for the LRB. These watercolours became one of the magazine’s most recognisable features. Appearing fortnightly until shortly before his death, they depicted domestic interiors, streets, railway stations, washing lines, birds, flowers, boats, windows, sockets, umbrellas, food, animals and other modest subjects. Their apparent ease concealed considerable technical control, careful composition and an alertness to mood, scale and visual wit. The Victoria and Albert Museum later acquired a group of his cover illustrations, noting how they combined a coherent style with arresting imagery while leaving space for typography (V&A website). His covers were collected posthumously in Artwork (Profile Books in association with the London Review of Books, 2012).
Campbell remained active almost until the end of his life, continuing to write reviews and make covers for the London Review of Books. Peter Campbell died in London, England on 25 October 2011. Posthumously, his work was shown in Peter Campbell: Artwork, held at City Gallery Wellington in 2013, later travelling to the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland. In the UK public domain, his work is represented in the V&A and British Museum collections.
Irene Iacono
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Peter Campbell ]
Publications related to [Peter Campbell ] in the Ben Uri Library