Elisabeth Whitworth Scott (20 September 1898 – 19 June 1972) was a British architect who designed the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, England. This was the first important public building in Britain to be designed by a female architect. Early life Scott was born in Bournemouth, England, one of ten children of Bernard Scott, a surgeon. She was a great-niece of the architects George Gilbert Scott and George Frederick Bodley and second cousin of Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Liverpool Cathedral. She was educated at home until the age of fourteen, when she enrolled at the Redmoor School, Bournemouth. In 1919, she became one of the early students at the Architectural Association's new school in Bedford Square, London, graduating in 1924. Career Scott's first position was with the architects David Niven and Herbert Wigglesworth, a practice specialising in the Scandinavian style. In turn she became an assistant to Louis de Soissons, a progressive architect producing buildings in the contemporary style for the new garden city of Welwyn, Hertfordshire (where she worked on the design for the Shredded Wheat Factory, now a listed building) and the modernist Oliver Hill. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre In 1927, a competition for a replacement to the burnt-out Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was announced and Scott entered, with a confidence in her own abilities taken from the sound theoretical grounding at the Architectural Association's school. At the time, she was working for Maurice Chesterton's practice at Hampstead, London, and Chesterton agreed to oversee her proposals for feasibility. (Maurice Chesterton was a cousin of the theatre's publicist A.K. Chesterton.) Maurice Chesterton's daughter Elizabeth Chesterton, herself an architect, claimed in a late interview that the competition entry had been falsely "submitted under Scott's name", suggesting that all research into the practical requirements of theatre function had been her father's. Maurice Chesterton himself "disclaimed any personal share whatever in the successful design". Scott was assisted by two fellow AA students: Alison Sleigh and John Chiene Shepherd. On winning the competition (against seventy-one other entries) the four formed a partnership to prepare the detailed plans and supervise the construction. The reaction to Scott's design was mixed. The Manchester Guardian suggested that, although the design reflected the building's purpose, its bulk in the small town was "startling...monstrous [and] brutal." The Times did not agree, observing how well the building "adapt[ed] itself to the lines of the river and landscape". Sir Edward Elgar,