Robin Stummer

Robin Stummer is a British-Austrian journalist, who writes for national newspapers and magazines in the UK, focusing on culture, history, conservation, photographic history and espionage. He studied English literature at Birmingham University, and journalism at City University, London. In the late 1980s he was a freelance writer for the Observer newspaper and the foreign desk of the Independent. He has also worked as a researcher for the author and journalist William Shawcross, current Chairman of the Charity Commission for England and Wales, on his biography of Rupert Murdoch.^[1] Stummer travelled in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. In 1989 and 1990 he was based in Sofia, Bulgaria, covering the fall of the Communist government of Todor Zhivkov, and its aftermath, for the Independent and other titles.

At the Independent on Sunday he covered arts, culture and heritage, and subsequently at the Guardian, where he was a journalist for Weekend magazine. He wrote on heritage, architecture, war and music. He is the only journalist to have taken part in a Russian Air Force surveillance flight, over Britain.^[2] In 1997 Stummer covered the General Election clash in the Tatton constituency, in the county of Cheshire, between Neil Hamilton and former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell, for the Independent on Sunday.^[3] Bell's Tatton victory, after a highly publicised campaign focused on the Cash-for-Questions scandal, was seen as the defining result of the British 1997 General Election which brought Prime Minister Tony Blair to power.

Other work by Stummer has included news and feature writing for the Observer, Guardian, Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers, and the New Statesman, Independent on Sunday Review and Quintessentially magazines, the latter as contributing editor. He is an occasional contributor to Private Eye. He has reported from across Europe, Russia and the Middle East.

Stummer has been involved in architecture and cultural protection campaigns, including those to protect the 17th-century Hampshire farmhouse home of portrait painter Mary Beale, the first woman professional artist in Britain to manage her own studio;^[4] the battle to keep open the Foundry bar in Shoreditch, east London, haunt of artists of the 1990s Britart scene;^[5] and to prevent the loss of historic buildings in the historic Liberty of Norton Folgate district of East London, a campaign joined by British pop group Madness;^[6] and to protect the medieval Harmondsworth Great Barn, Middlesex, at risk from the proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport.^[7] He has written on the threat to Soviet-era buildings in Moscow,^[8] the destruction of ancient villages in eastern Germany to make way for open-cast coal mines, and the discovery of a house with close links to the artist Peter Paul Rubens, near Antwerp, which local campaigners fear will be harmed with the expansion of the city's nearby container port.

Cornerstone magazine

In 2004 Stummer created and launched Cornerstone magazine, an architecture protection quarterly.^[9] He was the magazine’s editor. It was published by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), Britain’s senior conservation body, founded by William Morris in 1877. Cornerstone was read widely, a primary source for national and international media. The magazine was noted for its coverage of heritage issues and its photography. Writers included Germaine Greer, Julie Burchill, Jeanette Winterson, Martin Bell, John Tusa, Ken Russell, Bill Bryson, Robert Fisk and Rod Liddle. Photographers included John Lawrence, Simon Barber, Kippa Matthews, Laurence Weedy and Andy Marshall. Cornerstone became a journal of record at academic and public libraries in the UK and the US.

Under his editorship, Cornerstone carried out detailed reporting on major conservation threats posed by plans for airport expansion in south-east England, and notably on the likely damage to heritage buildings, sites and landscapes posed by the HS2 high-speed rail scheme. On HS2, Cornerstone revealed the cost to the historic environment of the rail scheme, from London to the north of England, and led critical reporting on this, from 2009 until early 2012.

Recent activity

Stummer has been researching the lives of the early Magnum agency photographers; politics, art and espionage in wartime Britain – for the Observer he broke the story of the “lost” hero of art and heritage protection, “Monuments Man” Major Ronald Edmond Balfour.^[10] For the same newspaper he brought to light the story of a leading figure of Pop Art movement in Britain, Pauline Boty.^[11] And he revealed the international dimension to the conservation battle in London to protect the Victorian Smithfield Market from destruction.^[12] Stummer has been researching the life of Matthias Sindelar, the Viennese footballer who during the 1930s was one of the world’s greatest players and who died in mysterious circumstances on the eve of the Second World War, work based on his investigative feature on Sindelar for the New Statesman.^[13]

Photography

Stummer studied documentary photography at the University of the Arts, London, and with the Magnum photojournalism agency in Munich. He has written on documentary reportage photography, including work by Robert Capa,^[14][15] Magnum photographers and wartime Life magazine photo editor and Magnum manager, John G. Morris,^[16] Cornell Capa, Gerda Taro^[17] and Lewis Morley.^[18]

References