June: Roots of Steel

This fascinating book spans the early part of a century of contradictions: From being the firstborn child of a steel magnate in England's industrial north in the thirties, via this comfortable upbringing; to being a respected architect in London in the fifties and sixties and later fostering an architectural Renaissance with a family-based design and construction company in California. June Holroyd looks back on her life which she describes in intimate and amusing detail. Underneath there are unsaid allusions to the incestuous and yet ultimately fulfilling relationship between America and England, the mother country and her strong son who has grown to become the most powerful nation in the world, through the war years and the cold war up to the present day.

June Holroyd is a tough woman, as her 'roots of steel' might indicate, some would say she was a feminist in her time, an early example of a successful self-made woman long before the business executives of the eighties and nineties, and yet there is affection here also. You will have to read this highly entertaining book and find out for yourself!

June Holroyd was born in England in 1926 into a Sheffield steel family. Her school was evacuated during the war to the Lake District. She earned her Architecture Degree in 1949 and worked in London 1949-1952. For two years she worked in Harvard and Chicago, Illinois 1952-54. Returning to London she restored a 1670 Nicholas Hawkesmoor house in Greenwich, later she won a design competition for Lewisham Town Hall. A resident of Santa Barbara, California since 1972, she is married with four children and nine grandchildren.