Fred Pooley

Who was Fred Pooley?

Fred Bernard Pooley CBE is best known as the county architect of Buckinghamshire, and his futuristic monorail proposals for a new town in north Bucks that eventually became Milton Keynes. Pooley was born in West Ham, east London and trained at the Northern Polytechnic in the evenings, while working in the West Ham engineer's department by day. He qualified as an architect, planner and surveyor before serving with the Royal Engineers during the second world war. He also qualified as a structural engineer and arbitrator.

He married Hilda in 1944 and had three daughters and lived in Whiteleaf, outside Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.

He was a supporter of mid-ranking architects, and ensured that project/job architects' names were put on all Buckinghamshire County Council buildings, not just the county architect, and promoted this idea to the wider profession. He was noted for his strong support of public transport, firstly with his monorail proposals for the new city that became Milton Keynes, and his later role in London where he identified the growing problem of the car and its impact on the city.