When’s An Architect Not An Architect?

TV celeb, Adrian Edmondson (the manic punk rocker in The Young Ones!) is in the dog house after becoming the latest presenter to inadvertently call one of Britain’s famous engineers an architect!

Just as Sellotape has become a way of describing transparent adhesive tape, so ‘architect’ seems to have become a noun for anyone who has done anything worthy on the engineering front.

Monsieur Edmondson recently presented Ade at Sea on ITV, in which he explored Britain’s maritime past over a series of six programmes.

But when he came to the life of Guy Anson Maunsell, the British civil engineer responsible for the design of the World War II Naval Sea Forts and Army Forts used by the UK for the defence of the Thames and Mersey estuaries, he appeared to ruffle a few feathers.

It would appear that the previously manic actor referred to Mr Maunsell as the ‘architect of the sea forts’, prompting mild outrage amongst members of the engineering community. One letter to the New Civil Engineer magazine even claimed that TV was determined to erase the role of the engineer in society!

“I assume some TV executive decided that civil engineer is not the preferred title so changed it. Imagine if we changed TV producers to ‘organisers’ or ‘managers’ I wonder how they would take it?” posed the question.

TV producers beware!