Leslie Gooday (1921- 2013) was born in Surrey and, after qualifying as an architect, worked on the Festival of Britain Southbank exhibition in 1951. In the 1960s he set up his own practice in Putney, Leslie Gooday & Associates , where he worked for several decades on various residential and civic projects predominantly in south-west London. One notable exception is his work on the British pavilion at the 1970 Expo in Japan, for which he received his OBE.

In 1961 he designed the Grade-II listed Richmond Baths, now known as Pools on the Park, a swimming pool and leisure facility in Old Deer Park in Richmond, London. Completed in 1966, it received a Civic Trust award a year later and is recognised by Historic England as illustrating “the more ambitious use of glazed curtain walling”.

Gooday designed his first house for personal use in 1953 in south-west London, close to Richmond Park. Just under a decade later, he began work on Long Wall. When Historic England listed the house at Grade II, they described it as having been designed in “a picturesque modern style” and “perhaps his most successful and certainly his most personal work”.