Fr Anthony Symondson SJ, who died on 31 January at the age of 83, was one of the 20th century’s most significant historians of ecclesiastical architecture. He became a leading commentator on modern church buildings, producing books on important architects like Ninian Comper and Stephen Dykes Bower. To this he added numerous reviews, chapters and editions; he also produced more devotional works on the life of St Paul VI and St Peter Favre and was a regular contributor to the Catholic Herald.
Symondson’s architectural work was inseparable from his faith; he traced its first stirrings to a visit he made as a young man to the Church of the Annunciation on Bryanston Street in London, just around the corner from Marble Arch. A soaring Anglican establishment done up in neo-Medieval style, he found himself totally overwhelmed by its beauty. Until then, churches had interested him, but he had regarded them only as places of worship of God and not as physical buildings in their own right.
