Christina Smith, dear friend of the Architectural Association (AA) over many decades and the school’s most generous supporter, has sadly passed away.
A community activist, entrepreneur, conservationist, property developer and landlord to numerous start-up design practices, importer, shop-keeper, restaurateur, gallery owner and huge theatre patron; Christina had many worlds, all within a short walk of Neal Street in Covent Garden.
For almost 60 years, since 1963, Christina’s world revolved around a historic neighbourhood that she played an essential role in protecting, improving and promoting. She campaigned vigorously and successfully in the 1970s to save Covent Garden from the GLC-planned demolition and development and, as a member of The Covent Garden Area Trust and the Seven Dials Monument Trust, she continued to play a central role in the area’s preservation and reinvention. She set up quirky, colourful shops for which Covent Garden became famous and, being well ahead of her time in realising the social value and financial potential of warehouse spaces, she gradually built a property empire that earned her the moniker of ‘queen of Covent Garden’.
As a benevolent landlord Christina offered much-needed studio and work space to brilliant young architects and other creative talents, with a degree of ‘flexibility’ in the setting of rents. As a newspaper article noted, she long exhibited an ability to ‘discretely adjust’ the rental expectations of her properties to ‘her tenants’ ability to pay’.
Some of Britain’s most recognised and influential architects and AA alumni who have gone on to create the landmark buildings of our time were beneficiaries of Christina’s belief in their talents. Her unique nurturing through the early stages of their careers was instrumental to their later success, and many became lifelong friends. The long and eclectic list also includes numerous non designers among her beneficiaries. While still a student at the AA, a young Fergus Henderson was given free reign of the kitchen at Smith’s on Sundays, when the restaurant was closed. She employed Graham Norton as a waiter much before he found television fame.
The AA was also a beneficiary of this nurturing generosity, with our students occupying a whole floor in Christina’s Seven Dials warehouse building for many years during the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when the school had no means to afford such studio space.
Becoming an active member of the AA in 1987, Christina regularly attended building visits and architectural trips, and developed a closer relationship that resulted in her being co-opted to AA Council in 2002. She became AA Vice President from 2011–2013, was appointed a Trustee of the Hooke Park Educational Trust in 2013, and from 2014–2020 supported the AA’s fundraising efforts as a trustee of the AA Foundation.
In 2013 Christina made a donation in support of AA Collections, bringing the AA Library, Archives, Photo Collection and Online Lectures – resources that were disseminated across different catalogues – into the unified portal and search engine we all use nowadays.
The same year she pledged a historic donation of over £1m, the largest gift the school has ever received, towards building improvements following the AA’s acquisition of adjacent properties. Her donation funded first of all the opening of a corridor that connects spaces across the top floors of our Bedford Square buildings, bringing Diploma Units together academically and socially, in what was enthusiastically billed at the time ‘the World’s longest Georgian corridor’. From 2016 her
donation made possible a bigger and even more ambitious project – the transformation of our basement spaces into what is now the Digital Prototyping Lab.
Christina followed these developments closely and became an integral part of the projects. The DPL’s robot arms were christened by their technicians as ‘Christina’ and ‘Smith’, and the diploma corridor has been known by all as ‘Via Christina’. For several years the AA’s birthday party each October was kicked off with a Via Christina Race, with students and staff running dangerously up the stairs in number 39 Bedford Square, along the length of ‘Via Christina’ (including a hurdle jump over the preserved banister of number 37) and down the stairs in number 32 for a final sprint to the finish line, where Christina awaited to award ‘special prizes’ from an eclectic personal collection of fashion accessories and imported artefacts.
Christina was a true eccentric with a quirky sense of humour. She attended more than one AA event wearing a favourite pair of glasses broken and held together with a thick piece of masking tape. She turned up with a pack of sparklers as a consolation gift on the day that AA Council banned the student firework display. And even in her 80s, late at night after an AA event, she would insist on walking back home from Bedford Square.
She served over the years as non-executive director, trustee or committee member of organisations including The Women’s Playhouse Trust, The Donmar Theatre, Ambassador Theatre Group, the Contemporary Arts Society and the Architecture Club. She joined the Urban Design Group interested in furthering a better co-existence and understanding between architects, planners and the general public with regards to the urban public realm. Christina was awarded and OBE in 2013. She was made an Honorary AA Member in 2014 and received an Honorary AA Diploma in 2016.
In 2014 Christina chose to celebrate her 80th birthday with us at the AA, surrounded by a wonderful reunion of many of the architects, designers and colourful personalities she had known since their early careers in Covent Garden.
Thank you Christina for making the AA world so much better, and for making our world part of yours.