15. Anne Thorne and Fran Bradshaw

Farrell Centre

Anne Thorne founded Anne Thorne Architects Partnership in 1991. Prior to that she was a founder member of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative 1980. Her work includes co-housing, the design of affordable passive housing and the conversion of existing houses to low energy standards and primary schools in Brixton and Essex including for children with special needs. Her work has always considered energy efficiency – excluding pollutants using natural and re-cycled materials. Collaboration is key to her practice. He work with artists on the re-design of the subway network at Aldgate included extensive community surveys, working with traffic engineers to enable planting trees in place of the subways. She was Master of the Art Workers Guild in 2019. Frances Bradshaw has been a partner at Anne Thorne Architects since 1995. She has focussed on how women’s lives shape and are shaped by buildings and the city, on participatory design, on regeneration and community projects, and on low energy and ecological building design including building to the the passivhaus standard. She has contributed through practice based research, lectures, articles and seminars to developing and forwarding sustainable design and construction, and has been Trustee of the Association for Environment Conscious Building since 2012. Fran studied architecture and trained as a bricklayer. In 1980 she was a founder member of Matrix, the feminist design collective, and is a joint author of ‘Making Space - Women and the man made environment’ (1984, reprinted 2022). Part of the series 20x20 – a podcast where we ask leading architects, urbanists and thinkers 20 questions over 20 minutes, exploring everything from their ideas and interests to the present and future of architecture and cities. Hosted by Owen Hopkins.