Visions of Welfare is co-hosted by the Women of the Welfare Landscape Project, the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB), and the Women in Danish Architecture project.

Presentations will consider the role of women in creating the spaces of the period of post-war Welfare States internationally with the aim of looking beyond individual achievements and professional boundaries. The conference will build on and further complicate recent, more discursive historiographies that better represent the complexity of how and by whom a built environment is formed and emphasise the diversity of women’s practices.

Tickets to this day conference at the Garden Museum also include access to two days of online sessions hosted by the SAHGB on Tues 2 and Tues 9 May. The full Visions of Welfare programme is available here: Visions of Welfare programme

 Garden Museum Day Conference Programme

09:30 – 10:00 Arrivals

10:00 – 11:00 Introductory Roundtable Discussion

Luca Csepely-Knorr, Elizabeth Darling, Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner

11:15 – 13:00 Session 1

Salvatore Dellaria, Cornell University: “How People Wanted to Live”: The Southgate Estate and its Hidden History of Failure

Holly Smith, University College London: Management and Maternalism: Joan Demers (Estate Manager) and the construction of a respectable community at the Park Hill estate, 1959-1965

Eve Pennington, University of Manchester: Subverting the State? Working-class Women’s Transformation of Planned Spaces in Skelmersdale New Town, c.1970-1989

Noemí Gómez Lobo & Kana Ueda, University of the Basque Country, ETH Zurich: Rebuilding Japan through women’s magazines: Miho Hamaguchi’s postwar housing lessons

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 Session 2

Helena Mattsson, KTH: Radical Bureaucracy: Women and Full-scale Experiment

Meike Schalk, KTH: Invisible Collectivity – Women in Large Architectural Offices in Sweden

Lisa Kinch, Lancaster University: Beyond the Operator: The Women Connecting the Welfare State

15:45 – 17:00 Session 3

Joy Burgess, University of Liverpool: Landscape Design as a ‘Self-sown seedling’

Sally Watson, University of Newcastle: ‘All children need the opportunity to play…’: Women’s play advocacy in the making of
Homes for Today and Tomorrow’

Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, KTH: Post Welfare Environments: Three women defining the Swedish environmental agenda
from the 1980s

6pm – Talk: Greening the Desert
Book Tickets

Landscape Architect Diana Armstrong Bell gained a unique perspective on her discipline whilst working in the Middle East in the 1980s. Whilst employed at Atkins Sheppard Fidler, she learnt the fundamentals of greening the desert from women like Grace Kirkwood, consultant landscape architect for Kenzo Tange, and applied these ideas at the Arabian Gulf University, Bahrain – even setting up a plant nursery on site. In this talk, Armstrong Bell will share the stories and inspiration that she drew from her experiences working in the Middle East as she re-trod the footsteps of Gertrude Bell (1869-1926), archaeologist, Arabist and writer.

Please note, tickets for the evening lecture are booked separately to the day conference. Ticketholders to the day conference are eligible for free entry to the evening lecture, just use the discount code we’ll send in your confirmation email.