ABSTRACT
This monograph sits between a biography, a select gazetteer, and a social history, using these three historiographical strands to consider the work of architects, Edwin Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) and Jane Beverly Drew (1911–96). Although these two architects are central to the narrative, the intention from the outset has not been to canonise Fry and Drew amongst the saints of a slender and particular reading of Modern architecture. Rather their careers provide a framework through which a distinct set of buildings from the twentieth century are examined. They are at the same time ordinary and remarkable: they both emerged from an aspiring middle-class, taking advantage of university educations to become stalwarts of modernist architecture in twentieth-century Britain, and their marriage in 1942 marked the commencement of a personal and professional relationship that lasted over 45 years.
