About Stephen Bayley
Stephen Paul Bayley (born 13 October 1951) is a Welsh writer and critic, known particularly for his commentary on architecture and design. He was founding CEO of the Design Museum in London in 1989, and has been a regular architecture, art and design critic for newspapers and magazines such as The Listener, The Observer, The Spectator and Car. == Childhood and education == Bayley was born on 13 October 1951 in Cardiff, Wales and spent his childhood years in Liverpool, England, attending Quarry Bank High School for Boys. He was inspired by Liverpool's architecture and its built environment. When Bayley was 15, he wrote a letter to John Lennon, who had also attended Quarry Bank as a teenager. Bayley's description of his English teacher analysing Beatles lyrics in class helped to inspire "I Am the Walrus". He was later educated at Manchester University and the University of Liverpool School of Architecture, where his mentor was the historian and conservationist Quentin Hughes, whose obituary he wrote in The Guardian, 16 May 2004. == Career == In the 1970s, he was a lecturer in the history of art at the University of Kent. He first became prominent as an authority on style and design when, in 1979, he began a collaboration with Habitat founder Sir Terence Conran to promote a more intelligent awareness of design. This led to the creation of The Boilerhouse Project, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which became London's most successful gallery of the 1980s.
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