Robert Myers obituary

My father, Robert Myers, who has died aged 86, was a structural engineer and co-founder of the civil and structural engineering practice Price & Myers.

Robert began his career in 1961 with Ove Arup and Partners, where he worked on a new building for Somerville College, Oxford. He then spent a period with the construction company Cementation in London and Tunisia. He was chief site engineer for the Marylebone flyover across Edgware Road, constructed from board-marked concrete in the mid-60s.

He returned in 1968 to the newly formed Arup Associates and worked on several of their well-known buildings, including Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Among his other Arup Associates work was a large depot for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and offices for Lloyd’s of London in Chatham.

In 1978 he and Sam Price established Price & Myers. Robert completed a remarkable range of engineering projects, including the largest landscape garden project since Chatsworth, at Sutton Place, in Surrey; repairs to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; and the Dublin Millennium footbridge.

He helped create a design office with a uniquely caring environment for both people and engineering design practice. The firm continues to flourish 45 years later. Many of the buildings Robert helped create are now listed; they all still exist. Those who worked with him remember him as a kind, bright, tenacious, curious and caring man. He retired from Price & Myers in 2007.

Robert was born in Pluckley, Kent, to Geoffrey Myers, a journalist, and Margot Guimiot, a French pianist. His early childhood was spent mainly in his mother’s family home in central France. But the second world war broke this idyll: Geoffrey went to join the RAF in England while Robert, because his father was Jewish and English, had to escape with his mother and sister from Nazi-occupied France. They eventually rejoined their father in Britain, where Geoffrey was serving with the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

After happy boarding school days at Frensham Heights school in Surrey, he studied engineering at London University and Imperial College. He married Angela Mellersh, an English teacher, in 1961 and they lived first in a caravan in Surrey and then in Soho before moving to Notting Hill, west London.

Robert’s marriage to Angela ended in divorce in 2015. He is survived by his second wife, Caroline “Skimp” Darke, whom he married in 2022; his daughters, me, Emily and Alice, from his first marriage; six grandchildren; and his brother, Bernard, and sister, Anne.

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