Jane Drew

Dame Jane Drew, DBE, FRIBA (24 March 1911 – 27 July 1996) was an English modernist architect and town planner. She qualified at the Architectural Association School in London, and prior to World War II became one of the leading exponents of the Modern Movement in London.

At the time Drew had her first office, with the idea of employing only female architects, architecture was a male dominated profession. She was active during and after World War II, designing social and public housing in England, West Africa, India and Iran. With her second husband Maxwell Fry she worked in West Africa designing schools and universities, and with Fry and Pierre Jeanneret, on the housing at Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab. She designed buildings in Ghana, Nigeria, Iran and Sri Lanka, and she wrote books on what she had learnt about architecture there. In London she did social housing, buildings for the Festival of Britain, and helped to establish the Institute of Contemporary Arts. After retiring from practice she travelled and lectured abroad, receiving several honorary degrees. She was awarded the DBE in the 1996 New Year Honours, gazetted 30 December 1995, only seven months before her death.

Drew was born as Iris Estelle Radcliffe Drew in Thornton Heath, Croydon (then part of Surrey), but her name was registered a few days later as Joyce Beverly Drew. Her father, Harry Guy Radcliffe Drew (grandson of Joseph Drew), was a designer of surgical instruments and the founder of the British Institute of Surgical Technicians: he was a humanist who "despised the profit motive and abhorred cruelty". Her mother was Emma Spering Jones, a school teacher, who when Jane was only four became lame for the rest of her life as the result of a road accident: but she continued to care well for her two daughters, encouraging them in her two main interests which were observation of nature and appreciation of art, and she had a keen business sense. Jane had an older sister, Dorothy Stella Radcliffe Drew (1909–1989), who became a physician and student of F. M. Alexander.

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