Hugh Greville Castle Spencely was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, England on 18 November 1900 and from 1921 to 1926 studied at Liverpool University School of Architecture where he was awarded a B.Arch. in 1926 and a Dip. Civic Design in 1928.
In 1928 he formed the partnership Minoprio & Spencely with Charles Anthony Minoprio (1900-1988) whom he had known since his school days and was a fellow student at Liverpool University. Projects by the partnership included an extension to the Royal School for the Blind in Liverpool (1932); and Fairacres, Roehampton, a Grade II listed four-storey apartment block at Roehampton Lane, Roehampton, London (1936). Between 1944 and 1946 they produced an outline plan for the postwar redevelopment of Worcester.
In the 1950s and 1960s Spencely worked again with Minoprio and another town planner, Peter Macfarlane, on master plans for several cities abroad. They designed plans for Kuwait City in 1951, Baghdad in 1956, Dhaka in 1959 and Chittagong in 1961.
Spencely was elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (ARIBA) in 1929. He died in Devizes, Wiltshire on 1 June 1983.
Sharples, Joseph, Powers, Alan and Shippobottom, Michael. Charles Reilly & the Liverpool School of Architecture 1904-1933. Catalogue of an exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 25 October 1996 - 2 February 1997. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996 p. 177 [Contains other references to Spencely, unfortunately, this very informative catalogue is not indexed]