Antony C Wolffe, who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) in 1944, has finally been awarded the City of Edinburgh Civic Design Medal he was due to receive 70 years ago.

Born in Berlin in 1920, Antony Wolffe fled his homeland in 1937 in the face of Nazi oppression.

He was awarded the Andrew Grant Scholarship to study at ECA in 1938, and spent six years at the College, gaining diplomas in Architecture and Town and Country Planning.

Despite the interruption to his studies by a period of internment, he came top in his final year and would have received the City of Edinburgh Civic Design Medal, but for wartime sensitivities around his nationality. Another student was offered the medal instead, but turned it down.

Given his medal on Monday at the opening of a retrospective exhibition of his student drawings in Edinburgh, he said: “I am chuffed. I never thought this would happen.

“It is wonderful and extraordinary. I’ve lived longer than I ever thought I truly would, so to see this exhibition of my work and to finally receive this medal, it is quite exciting.”

After the completion of his studies at ECA, Wolffe moved into architectural practice.

He set up his own office in Dumfriesshire in 1952 and was awarded an MBE in 1975.

He also worked part-time as an Inspector of Historic Buildings.

He retired in 2012, aged 92, and his archive is now housed at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).

The free exhibition of Mr Wolffe’s work, which includes key pieces from the archive that reveal Wolffe’s own interests, as well as the ways in which Architecture was taught at ECA at the end of the 1930s, has been organised by the RCAHMS and the Edinburgh College of Art.

It can be seen by members of the public between 10:00 and 16:00 from 27 to 30 January at the college’s Minto House.