Joyce Beverley Jane Drew [commonly known as Jane B. Drew and as Jane Drew*] was born in Thornton Heath, Surrey, England, on 24 March 1911 and studied at the Architectural Association School in London. She worked as an assistant to the architect Joseph Hill in London in 1938-39. From 1934 to 1939 she was also a partner with James Thomas Alliston (1908-2000) in the London-based architectural firm Alliston & Drew. Houses in Cambridge and Cliftonville, Kent designed by Alliston & Drew are discussed in Small Houses £500-£2500, edited by H. Myles Wright (1937 pp. 52, 110-111). She had married Alliston in 1934 and they divorced in 1939
Drew ran her own independent architectural practice, Jane B. Drew, from 1940 to 1945, during which time she was a consultant on kitchen planning for the British Commercial Gas Corporation (1941–43) and in 1943 organized the Royal Institute of British Architects' 'Rebuilding Britain' exhibition held at the National Gallery in London. In 1942 Drew married the architect E. Maxwell Fry (1899-1987), and from 1944 to 1946 they were assistant town-planning advisers to the colonies of Nigeria, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Sierra Leone and the Gambia. The pair subsequently had a long architectural association with this region of Africa. In 1946 they co-founded the firm Fry Drew & Partners in London. In 1951 Lindsay Drake and Dennys Lasdun joined the partnership which was was then known as Fry Drew Drake & Lasdun until 1958. When Frank F. Knight and Norman Creamer joined the the partnership in 1973 the name of the firm changed to Fry Drew Knight & Creamer.
Drew was Beamis Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1961), Visiting Professor of Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1970), and Bicentennial Professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah (1976). In 1945 Drew co-founded the 'Architects Year Book' (London: Paul Elek) and, with Trevor Dannatt (1920-2021), co-edited the first four volumes. She was the author or co-author of a number of books including 'Village Housing in the Tropics' with E. Maxwell Fry and Harry L. Ford (London: Lund Humphries, 1947) and 'Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone', with E. Maxwell Fry (New York, NY: Reinhold, 1956).
Drew was elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (ARIBA) in 1935, a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (FRIBA in 1942, Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and President of the Architectural Association. She died in Cotherstone, Durham, England, on 27 July 1996.
* Note her full name is given as Joyce Beverley [Jane] Drew by the DNB; Jane B(everley) Drew by Grove; and as Jane [Joyce] Beverley Drew by other sources
Architectural projects by Drew included houses in Cliftonville, Kent (with James Thomas Alliston, 1937), houses in Winchester, Hampshire (with James Thomas Alliston, 1937), Walton Yacht Works in London (1940), Saint Giles Mount in Winchester, Hampshire (1941), Prempeh College in Kumasi, Ghana (1946), Adisadel College, Ghana (with E. Maxwell Fry, 1946), Wesley Girls College, Cape Coast, Ghana (1947), Passfield flats in Lewisham, London (with E. Maxwell Fry, 1950), Waterloo Bridge entrance and Harbour Bar at the South Bank Exhibition of the Festival of Britain (1951), the architecture and planning of Chandigarh, India (with E. Maxwell Fry, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Albert Mayer, 1951-56), Whitefoot Lane Flats in Lewisham, London (with E. Maxwell Fry, 1953), University College in Ibadan, Nigeria (with E. Maxwell Fry, 1953-59), housing, health and amenity buildings for the Iran Oil Company in Tehran, Iran (1957-59), Women's Teacher Training College in Kano, Nigeria and the Teacher Training College in Wudil, Nigeria (with E. Maxwell Fry, 1958), planning of Gach Saran New Town in Iran (1959), offices for the Co-operative Bank in Lagos, Nigeria (1959), the Co-operaive Bank Assembly Hall and maisonettes in Ibadan, Nigeria (1959), a house in Hendon, London (1960), the Apowa Training Centre in Ghana (1964), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1964), housing in Hatfiel, Harlow and Welwyn, Hertfordshire (1964), Olympic Stadium and Swimming Pool in Kaduma, Nigeria (1965), School for the Deaf in Herne Hill, London (1966), buildings for the Open University in Milton Keynes, Nuckinghamshire (1969-77), Carlton House Terrace and Art Gallery in London (1970), hospital and nurses' residence in Torbay, Devon (1973), a factory for Gestetner in Stirling, Scotland (1976), and the Institute of Education in Reduit, Mauritius (1977).
AA Women in Architecture 1917-2017. Edited by Elizabeth Darling and Lynne Walker. London: Architectural Association and the authors, 2017
Bahga, Surinder. ‘Remembering Jane Drew’. Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects vol. 61, no. 6, September 1996 pp. 5-6
Bone, Stephen. ‘Personal portraits: Jane B. Drew’. Building January 1951 pp.18-19. Architects’ Journal 23 December 1948 pp. 575-578 [Architects: E. Maxwell Fry and Jans Drew]
Brockman, H. A. N. Fry, Drew, Knight, Creamer: Architecture. London: Lund Humphries, 1978
‘Design centre for British Rayon Industry, 1 Upper Grosvenor Street, London, W. 1.’.
Fry, E. Maxwell and Drew, Jane B. Architecture for Children. Allen & Unwin, 1944 [Revised edition, entitled Architecture and the Environment, London: Allen & Unwin, 1976]
Fry, E. Maxwell and Drew, Jane B. Village Housing in the Tropics. London: Lund Humphries, 1947
Fry, E. Maxwell and Drew, Jane B. Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone. London: Batsford, 1956
Fry, E. Maxwell and Drew, Jane B. Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zone. London: Batsford, 1964
Jackson, Ian. ‘Jane Drew’. Architectural Review vol. 236, no. 1409, July 2014 pp. 102-103.
Jackson, Ian. ‘Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry: traversing the Tropics’. Oase no. 95, 2015, pp. 34-47.
Jackson, Iain. 'Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew's early housing and neighbourhood planning in Sector-22, Chandigarh'. Planning Perspectives vol. 28, no. 1, 2013 pp. 1-26 [Contains an extensive bibliography on the Chandigarh scheme]
Jackson, Iain and Holland Jessica. The architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew: twentieth century architecture, pioneer modernism and the tropics. Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2014.
Jane B. Drew architect: tributes from colleagues and friends for her 75th birthday 24th March 1986. Edited by Sile Flower, Jean Macfarlane & Ruth Plant. Bristol, England: Bristol Centre for the Advancement of Architecture, 1986
Landau, Royston. 'Jane B. Drew'in Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects Volume 1. Edited by Adolf K. Plakzek. New York and London: Macmillan and Free Press, 1982 pp. 598-600
Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor. ‘Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa: The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1946-56’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians vol. 65, no. 2, June 2006 pp. 188-215
Llewellyn, Mark. ‘Designed by women and designing women: gender, planning and the geographies of the kitchen in Britain 1917-1946’. Cultural Geographies vol. 11, no. 1, January 2004 pp. 42-60
‘Obituary: Jane Drew’. Architecture & Design vol. 13, no. 6, November/December 1996, p. 14
Parker, Karen. 'Jane Drew. architect and practical idealist' in Women Designing: Redefining Design in Britain between the Wars. Edited by Jill Seddon and Suzette Worden. Brighton: University of Brighton, 1994 pp. 136-140.
The Women who changed architecture. Edited by Jan Cigliano Hartman. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2022