(b Akaroa, New Zealand, 19 Dec 1893; d Nottingham, 17 Nov 1960). New Zealand architect and teacher, active in England. He studied architecture at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, and had one year’s training in the architectural office of Cecil Walter Wood in Christchurch before joining the New Zealand Expeditionary Forces for three years’ service in World War I. He then enrolled in the School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool (1919), and in 1922 he won the RIBA’s Henry Jarvis Studentship, the runner-up prize to the Rome Scholarship in Architecture, which granted him a year’s residence in Rome. There he was exposed to the continental Modern Movement more forcibly than students in England and he, like other New Zealanders, was among the first modernists in Britain. On his return to England, Checkley became a lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Cambridge (1925). As an architect, he is important principally for two houses he built in Conduit Head Road, Cambridge, which were among the earliest flat-roofed, white-walled International Style houses in Britain: White House (1930–31), built for himself, of concrete frame and rendered brick, with symmetrical elevations, and Thurso (1932), built for Hamilton McCombie, which has a more informal plan and elevations. In 1934 Checkley was appointed Master of the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture (now the University of Westminster), and in 1937 he became Head of the School of Architecture at Nottingham University, retiring in 1948. His teaching commitments appear to have prevented him from undertaking any more architectural work.

• Checkley, George
  • England, §II, 6: Architecture, after c 1914