Maurice Emmitt Pickering was a landscape architect who was actively involved in his industry and in the City. A founder-member of the Worshipful Company of Constructors, he became its Master and steered it to attain Livery status.
Pickering was born in 1927 in Lincolnshire and educated in Coventry. He was then involved in Civil Defence and later commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. After the war he trained as an architect at Birmingham University before moving to London to study landscape architecture at University College London. He set up his London based practice in 1959.
Pickering became actively interested in the City of London in the early 1970s. He became a Freeman of the City in 1977 and was involved in the founding of the Worshipful Company of Constructors which was founded as the Company of Builders in 1976. He became the Master in 1984, steering the company through its name change to the status of a company without livery in 1985 and to full livery status in 1990.
Pickering also served as president of the Faculty of Building in 1983 and became an early and enthusiastic member of the fledgling Company of Chartered Architects in 1988. He progressed to becoming a senior steward, playing an active part in guiding the other company stewards as they rose through the ranks on their way to membership of the court - an honour which would have been his had it not been for age constraints imposed on the company at its foundation.
On other fronts Pickering, a voter in the Farringdon Ward of the City, became a member of the United Wards Club and the Royal Society of St George. He also joined the City Livery Club and progressed through the council to become its president in 2004-2005. His civic interests went beyond the City. He became heavily involved in the Freemen of England and Wales and became its president for a two year spell between 2002 and 2004.
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Last year Pickering’s contribution as the founder chairman of Harrow Nature Conservation Forum, a voluntary organisation managing some 600 acres of London’s Green Belt in the Borough of Harrow, was recognised when he was made Honorary Life Vice President of Harrow Heritage Trust.
He still found time to run his practice from his Stanmore home, to be involved in a number of charity organisations in and beyond Stanmore and act as a director of the Heidelberg Award for Environmental Excellence (a triennial global prize which he organised for the Oberb?rgermeisterin der Stadt Heiderberg). He was also a generous friend and supporter.
Spare time was in short supply. When found, Pickering spent it with his family, reading history, writing (he was working on a ground-breaking history of gilds) and painting in oils.
He is survived by his wife, a son and a daughter.
Maurice Emmitt Pickering, architect, was born on January 2, 1927. He died on January 22, 2008, aged 81