Richard Kirkby

Educated at a Quaker school, at Bristol University and the Architectural Association, in the early 1970s Richard Kirkby spread his wings to Cultural Revolution China. He had an agenda: to discover how it was that China had massively industrialised with none of the usual urban squalor. A rare foreigner working in China at the time, 1975-1977 Richard taught ex-Red Guards at Nanjing University. Duties included spells in rice paddies and factory machine shops, where he learned to turn a lathe.