The study of architectural acoustics made significant advances through the work of Harvard-based physicist W.C. Sabine in the closing years of the nineteenth century. The introduction of Sabine’s work to Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century and its furtherance as a building science was promoted by architect Hope Bagenal and physicist Alexander Wood. In the 1940s, construction began on three blocks of flats at Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire. The buildings represented one segment of large-scale housing project undertaken by Britain’s Building Research Station (BRS), a project with a two-fold purpose: to alleviate the contemporary housing shortage, and to provide full-scale working test sites for measuring and analysing the performance of different construction elements and methods. The three blocks of flats in question were significant to the overall programme in that they constituted the test sites for research into acoustic insulation. They were named Bagenal House, Rayleigh House, and Sabine House. In a play of letters, the nomenclature not only made reference to the initials of the BRS, it also paid homage to three significant contributors to the development of architectural acoustics: Philip Hope Edward Bagenal, Lord Rayleigh and Wallace Clement Sabine. The respective contributions of the latter two (both physicists) to the advancement of acoustic science is well-documented, and has been the subject of other dissertations. The former, Hope Bagenal, played a pivotal role in establishing the acoustic research agenda in Britain, introducing contemporaneous advances in the science to architectural application and adapting current scientific research and test methods to the context of the British construction industry. Throughout his lengthy professional career Hope Bagenal was preoccupied with the acquisition of measured acoustic data from myriad sites ranging from cathedrals to concert halls, inserting this corpus of information into his ongoing refinement of predictive models that were to be ultimately directive in the principles of design and construction. Continuous research, knowledge transfer, and real world applications reflected the achievements of a pioneer whose contributions to the BRS and the field of acoustics are discussed in this paper.