Elain Harwood
Elain Harwood (born June 1958) is an architectural historian with Historic England and a specialist in post-Second World War English architecture. Early life. Born in June 1958 in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, she attended Bramcote Hills Grammar School before reading history at Bristol University. It was the derelict terraces and docklands of Bristol that first drew Harwood to Bristol, but the city was also the home of Berthold Lubetkin and it was an exhibition of his work and the "Thirties" exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1979 that kindled an interest in modernism, and the modern buildings of her  childhood – schools and the Nottingham Playhouse – that had been so influential to her education, having come from a modest background. Career. Looking for a career, she took a temporary job in January 1984 at what was to become English Heritage, and has stayed there ever since, learning most from an inspiring day release course in Building Conservation at the Architectural Association. In 1987 she joined what had been the Greater London Council Historic Buildings Division, by then absorbed into English Heritage, just as research was needed on post-war buildings, and between 1996 and 2004 was responsible for most of  the organisation's recommendations for listing buildings from the period after 1945, as well as for research programmes on earlier cinemas and flats. She completed a PhD on the building of London's South Bank at Bristol University in 2010. Her substantial review of postwar English architecture, "Space, Hope and Brutalism", won the 2016 Alice Davis Hitchcock prize of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.