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Dr Smith received a BA and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD, funded by a Wolfson Scholarship, from University College London. She won Oxford University Press’s Duncan Tanner Prize 2022 for her research on the Ronan Point tower block disaster of 1968. She also won the Hawksmoor Medal 2022, awarded by the Society for Architectural Historians of Great Britain, for an article that revised mythologies about the Park Hill Estate in Sheffield. Dr Smith is interested in contemporary housing justice and the policy-oriented applications of historical research. She was a Civic Scholar at the Institute for Community Studies from 2022-23. She has also delivered research and training to industry professionals at the Local Government Association, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the London School of Architecture and the National Fire Chiefs Council.
Dr Smith is a historian of modern Britain. Her work lies at the intersection of architectural and political history. She is crucially preoccupied by how people translate their feelings about the built environment into language. At the centre of her research is an attempt to demonstrate that the built environment should be treated as more than a backdrop to history; its materiality, aesthetics and governance have provided the meat of political argument. Her first book, Up in the Air: A History of High-Rise Britain, will be published by Verso in autumn 2025. It explores how residents grappled with a brave new world above the old skyline. Interrogating the thorny inheritance of mid-century urban reconstruction, the book shows how high-rise buildings became a crucible for the welfare state’s reimagination over the decades. As a Research Fellow at St John’s, she is writing a new book, titled Community Architecture in Post-War Britain: Between Left and Right. Responding to the perceived repression of democracy in modernist urban design, the community architecture movement called for more participatory architectural practice. This project traces the curious migration of the movement’s arguments – from their emergence in leftist counter-culture during the 1960s-70s to their redeployment by figures on the right by the 1980s.
'The Ronan Point Scandal: Architecture, Crisis, and Possibility in British Social Democracy, 1968-93’, Twentieth Century British History, 34:4 (2023). Winner of the Duncan Tanner Prize 2022.
‘Demythologising Park Hill, Sheffield’, Architectural History, 66 (2023). Winner of the Hawksmoor Medal 2022.
‘The Community Architecture Movement’ in Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler, and Otto Saumarez Smith (eds), The Modern British City (Lund Humphries, 2025).
