Elizabeth Foulkes obituary

My mother, Elizabeth Foulkes, who has died aged 98, was an architect who worked on public buildings and landscape projects and helped define standards for architects in the UK.

Elizabeth was born in Abertillery, Monmouthshire, to Allan Johnson, who worked for the Co-op insurance society, and Williamina (nee Innes), known as Billy, a councillor and magistrate, and attended Wimbledon high school after the family moved to London. She started her architectural training at Wimbledon School of Art (now part of the University of the Arts London) in 1941, and took her intermediate exam in 1945, just as the second world war came to an end and a new dawn for architecture arrived.

Between 1945 and 1948 she studied for a bachelor of architecture degree at the University of Liverpool school of architecture, where she met Ralph Colwyn Foulkes. They married in 1950. By 1949 she had attained a diploma in civic design and was registered as an associate member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Royal Town Planning Institute.

In 1952 Elizabeth joined Ralph at his father Sidney Colwyn Foulkes’s architecture firm in Colwyn Bay, which designed housing, town halls, civic buildings, hospitals, schools, universities and large industrial and landscape projects. Elizabeth herself designed the women’s halls of residence at Bangor University.

This role allowed her to make the most of her time and considerable energy, and she became vice president of RIBA and the first female president of the Society of Architects in Wales. She served, as chair or committee member, with the Countryside Commission, the Nature Conservancy Council, the National Parks Council and the Council for the Protection of Rural Wales, and was an adviser to the National Grid. She also became a justice of the peace, deputy lord lieutenant of Clwyd and ombudsman of Aberconwy district council.

As vice president of RIBA in 1975, Elizabeth chaired the committee that produced the “competence report”, which defined expected behaviour in the profession after a corrupt architect was found to have bribed a local authority official to win contracts. She was appointed MBE in 1974 and awarded the Jubilee medal in 1977 for her services to architecture and the environment, and remained well informed and committed to equality, social justice and the Welsh countryside for the rest of her life.

Ralph died in 2018. She is survived by her children, Innes, Huw and me, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.