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ANN MACEWEN
Born:
Sutton, Surrey,
1918
Lived:
Wootton Courtenay
Recording made: 2001
Length of recording: 2 hrs 20 mins
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Ann MacEwen is an architect and planner. She helped rebuild the East End after the war, when there was a lot of fervour for creating a better London, and worked with Geoffrey Jellicoe planning Hemel Hempstead. She also undertook a study on traffic in towns with Colin Buchanan, later going into partnership with him (and others) in Bristol.
She and her husband Malcolm bought a house in Wootton Courtenay in 1968. In 1974 he was appointed to the new National Park Committee, where he became a fierce campaigner against ploughing up the moorland. They were turbulent times. Between them, she and Malcolm have written a number of books on the problems facing national parks and the countryside.
She is now writing a book about her grandparents, Dollie and Ernest Radford, who were poets and socialists and part of the Arts and Crafts Movement. She has learnt to weave, exquisite garments in silk, and helped set up the local University of the 3rd Age. She has put down roots, she says.