Research Fellow, St John’s College, University of Cambridge

Dr Holly Smith is a historian of modern Britain specialising in urban history, with a particular focus on the architecture and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the centre of her research is an effort to demonstrate that the built environment should be treated as more than a backdrop to history; its materiality, aesthetics, and governance have themselves been central to political argument.

Dr Smith completed her BA (2019) and MPhil (2020) at the University of Cambridge before undertaking a PhD, funded by a Wolfson Scholarship, at University College London (2020–2023).

Her first book, Up in the Air: A History of High-Rise Britain (Verso, Autumn 2025), explores how residents of high-rise council housing grappled with a brave new world above the old skyline. Interrogating the complex legacy of mid-century urban reconstruction, the book shows how high-rise buildings became a crucible for the welfare state’s reimagination over subsequent decades.

Housing justice is a major theme in Dr Smith’s work. Her research on the Ronan Point tower block disaster of 1968 and the ensuing scandal was awarded Oxford University Press’s Duncan Tanner Prize in 2022. She also received the Hawksmoor Medal 2022 from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for an article that revisited mythologies surrounding the “streets in the sky” design at Sheffield’s Park Hill Estate.

As a Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, Dr Smith is currently working on a new book, Community Architecture in Post-War Britain: Between Left and Right. Responding to the perceived repression of democracy in modernist urban design, the project traces the evolution of the community architecture movement — from its roots in leftist counter-culture during the 1960s and 1970s to its later adoption by figures on the political right in the 1980s.