Cathedral Basilica of the Holy Family

The Catholic congregation in Nairobi began among railway construction workers camped near what became the first station, and its first church, built in 1904, was the earliest stone building in the city. By 1960 it seated three or four hundred and the archdiocese wanted ten times that. Dorothy Hughes, the first woman to practise as an architect in East Africa, drew the replacement that year; the British contractor Mowlem built it between 1960 and 1963, and it opened on 6 July 1963, five months before Kenyan independence. It is a plain modernist box handled with some nerve: one wide span, a height of about thirty metres, a large cross on the front, eight chapels and two side altars off the main volume, abstract stained glass in stainless-steel frames rather than the figurative windows a cathedral of that date would normally have had, and Carrara marble used sparingly. It was made a minor basilica in 1982.