Ann MacEwen: Dynamic urban planner

Ann MacEwen was one of the dynamic team of architects and planners at London County Council who strove to rebuild East London after the devastating bombing of the Second World War. She was the principal woman in the planning team, under Arthur Ling and Percy Johnson-Marshall, and was a much-admired leader of a group of young planners.

When the money for this idealistic work dried up, she left the LCC in 1961 to join the Ministry of Transport group, led by Colin Buchanan, writing the seminal Traffic in Towns report (1963); she was the only woman in the team. Her association with Buchanan continued as a partner in his consultancy, where she was in charge of planning and transport studies of cities of high architectural quality including Bath, Edinburgh, Canterbury and Bergamo, Italy.

Her other important professional work was the co-authorship, with her husband Malcolm MacEwen, of two deeply researched and provocative books about national parks in the UK, National Parks: conservation or cosmetics? (1982) and Greenprints for the Countryside (1987). The inspiration for this arose from their decision, in 1968, to move their main home from Hampstead, London to Wootton Courtenay in Exmoor. Malcolm subsequently worked on the Exmoor National Park Committee, where he led a long, bitter and successful campaign to save the moorlands of the park from ploughing.

Ann MacEwen's distinguished career was animated by her socialist background and convictions. Her grandparents, Ernest and Dollie Radford, were prominent in the arts and crafts movement and colleagues of William Morris in the Socialist League. Her parents, Maitland and Muriel Radford, were both doctors, he as Medical Officer of Health for Shoreditch, she in public health for children. Ann was thus a third-generation socialist.

Born Ann Radford in 1918, she followed her mother to Howell's School, a boarding school, in Denbigh, Wales. She then studied architecture at the Architectural Association, a hotbed of progressive ideas, and graduated in 1940. Here she met her first husband, John Wheeler, a gifted architect with whom she had two daughters, only for him to be killed test-flying with the RAF in September 1945. She then worked for two years as planning assistant, with Geoffrey Jellicoe, on the master plan for Hemel Hempstead New Town.

In 1947, she married Malcolm MacEwen, a journalist on the Daily Worker and member, as she was, of the Communist Party. Both had been widowed and both had a physical disability: Malcolm had lost a leg in a motor-cycle accident before the war, Ann had suffered polio in early childhood and walked with a limp. With typical good humour, they said they had two good legs between them.

Ann MacEwen then did a compressed course in town planning while pregnant with her third daughter, and so qualified for a post in the LCC team. She combined her work with the raising of a young family, refusing to work Saturdays at the office (which joined with male prejudice to limit her chances of promotion), but leading her team with clarity and cheerful determination. In those post-war years, bomb damage and slums blighted the townscape of Stepney and Poplar in east London and the lives of citizens.

Working closely with the architects, MacEwen's planning team strove to realise the vision set out in Sir Patrick Abercrombie's County of London Plan (1943), a project on the scale of a new town but on much more difficult terrain. Much was achieved, including the building of tower blocks which later became part-discredited after the explosion at Ronan Point in Newham in 1968, but funding gradually dried up.

MacEwen's work from 1961 with Colin Buchanan – on the Traffic in Towns report, in his consultancy, and as a senior lecturer at his School of Advanced Urban Studies at Bristol University – presented a challenge strongly suited to her clear mind, calm professional judgement and personal vigour. In the 1960s and 1970s, British and European cities were under severe strain from the growth of traffic and commerce, the demands of which threatened their historic urban structures.

The Buchanan team strove to find the balance between heritage and modern needs, between commerce and humanity. MacEwen's work during this period was illuminated by her husband's own work, on the staff of the Architectural Journal, and then as chief information officer with the Royal Institute of British Architects (both MacEwens had left the Communist Party in 1956, when the Daily Worker refused to report the facts of the Soviet invasion of Hungary).

After more than 30 years in city planning, Ann MacEwen turned in the late 1970s to thinking and writing about national parks, in close partnership with her husband. With funding from the Nuffield Foundation and a base at University College London, they researched for two books and teased out the arguments, in a fine combination of combative journalism and rigorous argument. Their provocative challenge has indeed helped the national parks to become, in their words, "greenprints for the countryside".

At Wootton Courtenay, Ann and Malcolm created a welcoming home, much loved by their growing family. They explored Exmoor on ponies. Ann learnt to weave, making exquisite garments in silk, and helped to set up the local University of the Third Age. Malcolm suffered strokes in the 1990s and Ann cared for him till his death in 1996, which ended their long, lively and productive partnership. She sold the house at Wootton Courtenay in 2004, and moved into sheltered accommodation.

Michael Dower

Ann Maitland Radford, planning consultant: born Sutton, Surrey 15 August 1918; Planning Assistant, Hemel Hempstead New Town Master Plan 1946-47; Architect-Planner, London County Council 1949-61; Member, Colin Buchanan's Group, Ministry of Transport 1961-63; researcher, Transport Section, Department of Civil Engineering, Imperial College London 1963-64; Partner, Colin Buchanan and Partners 1964-73; Senior Lecturer, Bristol University School of Advanced Urban Studies 1974-77; married 1940 John Wheeler (died 1945; two daughters), 1947 Malcolm MacEwen (died 1996; one daughter); died London 20 August 2008.