ABSTRACT
The William Graham Holford who returned to Merseyside in 1933 was a much developed version of the young man who had departed less than three years before. The advance in his intellectual and emotional maturity was out of all proportion to the time which he had spent in Rome. Holford was not above such enthusiasm for new techniques or materials, but neither did he make a fetish of technology. By the end of 1934 Holford was, like Stephenson and Cole, a member of the Modern Architectural Research group. Since 1909 the Liverpool School of Architecture had contained a Department of Civic Design, the first such institution in the world. Slum clearance and redevelopment provided opportunities for civic design on a large scale, and in Liverpool the Director of Housing, Lancelot Keay, employed students and graduates from the School of Architecture with results that were admired at the time.
