Research interests

My first book is titled Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain. It is the first monograph about the profound transformations of British city centres in the 1960s. The book details the rise and fall of this complex and notorious subject, where it has often been said that urban planners did more damage to Britain’s cities than even the Luftwaffe had managed. The result is the first account to reveal the origins and dissolution of the cross-party consensus on modernist urban planning. The book locates architectural and planning history within its wider political, cultural, and intellectual milieu.

The book was a History Today book of the year, and has been reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement (David Kynaston), The New Statesman (Lynsey Hanley), Prospect (Will Self), The Observer (Rowan Moore), The Literary Review (Elain Harwood), The Daily Telegraph, Architectural History, Urban History, The RIBA Journal, Architecture Today, Journal of Modern History, The Burlington Magazine, Planning Perspectives, Reviews in History, Context, C20 Magazine, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, and Contemporary British History. Paperback August 2020.

I have been working towards a second monograph, provisionally titled From White Heat to Burn Out: The Twilight of Urban Modernism. This will be an archive-based, interdisciplinary history of the way that people came to disavow orthodoxies about the modernist reconstruction of the built environment during the long-1970s.

I am interested in leisure centres, post-war university architecture, inner cities, shopping centres, and the workings of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. I have written about architectural practices including Gillespie, Kidd & Coia; Chamberlin Powell & Bon; Sheppard Robson; Building Design Partnership; Howell, Killick, Partridge & Amis; and Powell & Moya.

Selected publications

• (book) Boom Cities, Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2019)
• (article) ‘The Lost World of the British Leisure Centre’, History Workshop Journal (2019): https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbz007/5519070
• (article) ‘Action For Cities: The Thatcher Government and Inner City Policy’, Urban History (2020): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/urban-history/article/action-for-cities-the-thatcher-government-and-innercity-policy/C479FD0A7B1C821199F4EAD302F19BBE#
• (article) ‘The Inner City Crisis and the End of Urban Modernism in 1970s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 24.7 (2016), pp. 578-598: https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article/27/4/578/2525297 
• (article) ‘Landscapes of Hope and Crisis, Derelict Land and Leisure in 1970s Britain’, Journal of British Studies (2023)

  doi:10.1017/jbr.2023.

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Professional associations

Editorial board of the journal Architectural History: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/architectural-history 

I run a research network, called SPUD, with Professor Simon Gunn (Leicester)

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries

Trustee of the Twentieth Century Society

Qualifications

• BA (Warwick)
• MPhil (Cantab)
• PhD (Cantab)