Janet Barbara Gnosspelius

Blev 84 år.

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Despite her roots in the Lake District, my cousin Janet Gnosspelius's heart was in Liverpool. Janet, who has died aged 83, trained at the Liverpool School of Architecture in the 1940s, and was one of "an elite bunch of students" that included only a few women. She built a reputation in church architecture and restoration, working for a time for the church architect Francis Xavier Velarde.

From the late 1960s, she developed a new life in local history and conservation. In 1972 the threatened demolition of Woolton Hall (Janet's report led to it being listed Grade I) stimulated the founding of the still flourishing Woolton Society. Janet's The History of Much Woolton (1975) is still in demand. Working with her close friend Sylvia Lewis, Janet was a formidable force in Liverpool planning inquiries, authoritatively challenging attitudes on conservation and even road planning. She would regularly deliver to the city planning office chunks of masonry, neatly labelled with provenance and date, asking that they be replaced.

Janet came from an unusual background. Her mother, Barbara, the daughter of WG Collingwood, John Ruskin's secretary, was an artist and sculptor; Arthur Ransome had once proposed to her and although he was unsuccessful still dedicated Old Peter's Russian Tales (1916) to her. Janet's engineer father, Oscar, Swedish by origin, worked in mining and railway construction in southern Africa before returning to the Lake District, where he designed and built seaplanes and where Janet was born, in Kendal. Between the wars, Oscar prospected on the Coniston fells with Collingwood, mining for copper and later slate. Ransome drew on Oscar's mining expertise in his 1936 book Pigeon Post; Oscar was the model for Timothy (Squashy Hat) and Janet modelled for the drawing of Nancy.

Janet was meticulous in everything she did – and eccentric. She was known for her jodhpurs, collar-and-tie, handmade tweeds and elegant cigarette holder, her cats (who signed off many letters), 1939 Sunbeam Talbot car, prodigious workload and caustic red pen. She carried on an extraordinary range of correspondence, all hand-typed on a battered Imperial.

She was widely consulted as a source and authority on local history, Ruskin, Ransome, Icelandic saga-sites, Lake District artists and history, church architecture, and the work, life and ideas of her uncle, the philosopher and historian RG Collingwood. For the past 15 years she had been amassing material for WG Collingwood's biography.

I and another cousin survive her.

Källa:www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/oct/10/janet-gnosspelius-obituary

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