I was enjoying my first visit to the United States and my first full-time stint as a teacher in the School of Architecture at the University of Kansas when one morning in early February 1966, I got the long distance phone call. It was Jimmy Munce calling from the Belfast office of James Munce Partnership. His husky military-style accent with its slight English overtones sounded a trifle more excited than usual. ‘We're going to be interviewed for a planning job in Londonderry,’ he said. ‘Can you fly back for a few days?’ I felt myself suddenly caught up in Jimmy's excitement as I had been so many times previously in the seven or eight years I had known him. ‘I'll arrange it,’ I replied. ‘When do I need to be there?’

Ten days later I found myself on my way back to Belfast thinking of the busy few days that lay ahead and wondering if Jimmy's optimism about getting the commission was justified. There had been some disappointments in the past and before my departure to the United States the firm's application to prepare a plan for Belfast had been rejected, even though the Munce Partnership (then Munce and Kennedy) had entered into association with the prominent Scottish planners Sir Robert Matthew and Percy Johnson-Marshall. James Frederick Munce was not a man to be deterred by a few temporary setbacks. He had returned from the Second World War a major and a toughened veteran of the Burma campaign, to inherit his father's small but successful civil engineering practice.