Eugenie Dorothy Hughes, born Ullmann in London in 1910, was taken as a child to Eldoret in the Rift Valley, returned to London to study at the Architectural Association, and came back to Kenya to practise. She was the first woman to work as an architect in East Africa, became a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1946, and ran her own firm, Hughes and Polkinghorne, designing hospitals, hotels, schools and clubs across the colony; she was appointed MBE in 1950 for her hospital work. Her largest building is the Cathedral of the Holy Family in Nairobi, designed in 1960 and seating four thousand under non-figurative glass. She sat on Nairobi City Council and then the Legislative Council, attended the 1960 Lancaster House conference on Kenyan independence, and spent her later years on social welfare and disability work. She died in 1987.
