A thoroughly modernist architect

Elisabeth Scott designed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon and the Pier Theatre in her home town, so isn’t it time that this daughter of Bournemouth had a blue plaque?

- Jeremy Miles

Pioneering Bournemouth born architect Elisabeth Scott was a talent to be reckoned with. In 1919, at the age of 21, she became one of the first women allowed to study at London’s prestigious male-dominated Architectural Association.

Within a decade she had won an international competition to design the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Revered amongst modernist designers she should have become a household name. She had her own London practice, an impressive reputation and a string of landmark buildings to her name. It wasn’t to be though. A combination of patriarchal bombast, Scott’s reticence to blow her own trumpet and the havoc wreaked by World War II contrived to bury her star. Her late-career, in the 1950s and 60s, found her back in her home town working quietly for the Bournemouth borough architects department.

Though she continued to shine, designing Bournemouth’s Pier Theatre and several other important buildings, Scott took little credit for her own work. Her designs were published bearing the name of her boss, the borough architect John Burton.

She retired in 1968, just another council employee who had served out her time. Scott died four years later virtually forgotten.

A flurry of interest followed the introduction of the last redesign of the British passport in 2015 when Scott and her buildings, including Bournemouth’s Pier Theatre, were celebrated in watermark images on the visa pages. But essentially she remains an unsung heroine of the architecture and design world without any memorial of her name to be found in Bournemouth, the town where she was born, educated and ended her career.