Dr Holly Smith
Dr. Holly Smith is an historian of modern Britain. She did her PhD at UCL, and is an incoming Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. Her first book, on the history of high-rise housing in Britain, is being published by Verso.
Holly’s talk is drawn from her new post-doctoral research on the community architecture movement, which emerged in Britain across the 1960s to the 1980s. Responding to the perceived repression of democracy in 'modernist' post-war urban design, community architecture called for more participatory approaches to architectural practice and town planning. Holly will trace the migration of the movement’s arguments, from their emergence in leftist counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s to their redeployment by figures on the right by the 1980s. The history of community architecture suggests that the ‘New Left’ and ‘New Right’ – which have conventionally been characterised as profoundly polarised camps – drew upon a shared political language in post-war Britain.
Please send questions, should you have any, to Tom (tj307@cam.ac.uk) or me (jxs21@cam.ac.uk). Please also note that for this seminar series, we will not be providing any Zoom links - attendance will be in-person only.