Sir Basil Urwin Spence, OM OBE RA (13 August 1907 – 19 November 1976) was a Scottish architect, most notably associated with Coventry Cathedral in England and the Beehive in New Zealand, but also responsible for numerous other buildings in the Modernist/Brutalist style.

He enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) in 1925, studying architecture,[3] where he secured a maintenance scholarship on the strength of the "unusual brilliance" of his work.

He won several prizes at the college, and meanwhile carried out paid work drawing architectural perspectives for practising architects including Leslie Grahame-Thomson, Reginald Fairlie and Frank Mears.

It was designed in a modernist Regency style, with assistance from Perry Duncan, an American architect hired by the Colvilles when Spence was too busy with exhibition work to progress the project.

His work included, prior to D-Day, the design of a counterfeit oil terminus at Dover as part of the Operation Fortitude deception plan for the Normandy landings.

Basil Spence & Partners were responsible for the redevelopment and extension of the University of Glasgow's Kelvin Building, which houses its School of Physics and Astronomy.

[9] Some of this is still on display in the Kelvin Building today, with other items having been moved to form part of an exhibit at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery.

On 14 November 1940, Coventry's Anglican Cathedral was extensively damaged by German bombing, a year into World War II.

In 1944, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott submitted a design proposal to rebuild the cathedral but this was rejected by the Royal Fine Arts Commission.

On 23 February 2012 the Royal Mail released a stamp featuring Coventry Cathedral as part of its "Britons of Distinction" series.

[2] Spence was responsible for contextual modernist buildings on The Canongate in Edinburgh, near the new Scottish Parliament and in view of Holyrood Palace, named Brown's Close and listed in 2008.

In 1960, Spence designed Mortonhall Crematorium in Edinburgh's Braid Hills area (based on the same angled fin concept as found at Coventry Cathedral).

In 2006, he was the subject of a BBC Scotland documentary, Rebuilding Basil Spence,[16] which revised his place in 20th-century British architecture and asked why he had been for so long overlooked.