The chief executive of Maggie’s cancer care centres and the woman who led the restoration of Wentworth Woodhouse have been made dames in the Queen’s birthday honours.

Laura Lee, a former cancer nurse, set up Maggie’s with a patient, the late Maggie Keswick Jencks and her husband Charles Jencks, in 1995 and has commissioned a string of world-famous architects including Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas to design 20 centres at hospitals across the country. Rogers Stirk Harbour’s west London centre won the Stirling Prize in 2009.

Julie Kenny, who also received a damehood, is the unpaid chair of the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust. The grade I-listed Georgian mansion near Rotherham, described as England’s largest privately owned home and having the longest façade of any country house in Europe, had fallen into disrepair.

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