CURRICULUM VITAE

​

CURRENT  POST

​

2015-: The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London

• Lecturer, History & Theory of Architecture 

Module leader: Animal Architecture (2022-, March, Yr4); Architecture and the Image of Decay (2015-, March, Yr4));  (2015-, MArch, Yr4); Representations of Architecture (2019-, BSci, Yr2)

Supervisor, MArch theses  (2016-); MA Landscape Architecture theses (2020-)

 

EDUCATION

​

2003-2006: University of Reading

• PhD: History of Art and Architecture

Thesis: ‘Into the belly of the beast: spatial representation and London’s main drainage system, c. 1848-68’ (result: pass)

 

2000-2001: University of Reading

• MA: Visual and Verbal Representation in British Culture 1840-1940

Dissertation: ‘Seeing and smelling decay: sanitary rhetoric in the 1840s and 1850s’ (result: pass)

 

1995-1998: University of Reading

• BA (Hons): History of Art and Architecture (result, 2:1)

 

1987-1992: Wellingborough School

• 4 A-levels (Art, Maths, Physics and General Studies); 9 GCSE’s (Math’s, Physics, Chemistry, Music, English Literature, English Language, French, Geography, Biology)

​

CAREER HISTORY

​

2013-2016: University of Manchester

• Lecturer in Art History

Module leader: Ruin Lust: Visual Cultures of Decay from the Baroque to the Present Day (2014, Yr3); Function, Fantasy and Victorian Architecture (2013, Yr1); Victorian Babylons: Representing the Nineteenth-century City (2013, Yr3)

Co-convener and lecturer: Cities (2013, Yr1)

Undergraduate dissertation supervisor (2014-15)

Lecturer and module leader, From Cottonopolis to the Post-Industrial City, Manchester International Summer School (2015)

 

2011-2012: University of Manchester

• Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester: 2-year project, ‘Function & fantasy: Victorian decorative cast iron’

 

2006-2010: University of Reading

• Postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading: researcher for 4-year AHRC-funded project ‘Designing Information for Everyday Life, 1815-1914’

                                                

2009-2010: Birkbeck College, University of London

• Sessional lecturer: designing and delivering a 10-week course on subterranean London; assessing students’ accredited work; leading study trips

 

2002: ArtBibliographies Modern, 4640 Kingsgate, Cascade Way, Oxford Business Park South, Oxford

• Editor: abstracting literature on twentieth-century art; indexing; editing, writing; proofreading; managing freelancers

 

RESEARCH & WRITING INTERESTS

​

• Anarchism and architecture

• Ecology and architecture

• Nineteenth-century architecture

• Underground urban space

• Everyday print in the nineteenth century

• Ruins in visual culture

• Future cities in art, literature and cinema

 

PUBLICATIONS & PAPERS

​

Books:

​

• Geological Architecture: Minerals, Buildings and Us (contracted by Reaktion for publication in 2025)

​

• Botanical Architecture: Plants, Buildings and Us (Reaktion, 2024)

​

• Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us (Reaktion, 2023); translated into Chinese

 

• Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority (Paul Holberton, 2021)

 

• Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination (Reaktion, 2019); translated into Chinese and Arabic 

 

• The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay (IB Tauris, 2017)

 

• Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain (Ashgate, 2014)

 

• London's Sewers (Shire, 2014)

 

• Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Spire, 2009)

 

Edited books:

 

• Manchester: Something Rich and Strange, co-edited with Sarah Butler (Manchester University Press, 2020)

 

• Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within, co-edited with Carlos López Galviz and Bradley L. Garrett (Reaktion, 2016); translated into Chinese 

 

• Function & Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Peter Sealy (Routledge, 2016)

 

Edited journals: 

 

• 'Architecture and Dirt', co-edited with Ben Campkin, special issue of the Journal of Architecture 12: 4 (2007)

 

Articles and chapters in edited books:

​

• ‘Foreword’, in Colin Ward, Talking to Architects (Freedom Press, 2022), pp. 1-5

​

• 'Future cities in literature’, in The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies, ed. Lieven Ameel (Routledge, 2022), pp. 464-78

 

• ‘Introduction: the b-sides of Architecture’, in The B-Sides of Architecture, ed. Markus Lehr (2021), pp. 2-5

 

• ‘Cab-fare maps’, in Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, eds Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Miranda Critchley, and Olivia Horsfall Turner (Reaktion, 2020), pp. 56-9

 

• ‘Manchester: seeing like a city’ (with Sarah Butler), in Manchester: Something Rich and Strange, co-edited with Sarah Butler (Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 1-23

 

• ‘Exploring cities within’ (with Bradley L. Garrett and Carlos López Galviz), in Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within, ed. Paul Dobraszczyk, Carlos López Galviz and Bradley L. Garrett (Reaktion, 2016), pp. 14-21

 

• 'Architecture unbound’ (with Peter Sealy), in Function & Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Dobraszczyk and Peter Sealy (Routledge, 2016), pp. 1-22 

 

• ‘Meta-ornament: iron and the railway station in Britain,’ in Function & Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Dobraszczyk and Peter Sealy (Routledge, 2016), pp. 201-19

 

• 'Chernobyl diaries: monuments, ruins and memories,’ in Cold War Cities: History, Culture and Memory, ed. Katia Pizzi and Marjatta Hietala (Peter Lang, 2016), pp. 145-67  

  ​

• 'Londons under London: mapping neo-Victorian spaces of horror,' in Neo-Victorian Cities: Re-Imagining Utopian and Dystopian Metropolises, ed. M. H. Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Rodopi, 2015), pp. 227-45

 

• ‘Modern geisterstadte: Pripyat, Ukraine - leben nach Tschernobyl,’ in Refurbished Future: Werte, Ressourcen and Strukturen - Erganzen Statt Ersetzen, ed. Christoph M. Achammer (Verlag, 2011), pp. 212-21

 

• ‘Designing and gathering information: perspectives on nineteenth-century forms,’ (with Paul   Stiff and Mike Esbester) in Information History in the Modern World, ed. Toni Weller (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 57-88

 

• ‘Talking shit: a conversation between Bruno Rinvolucri and Paul Dobraszczyk,’ (with Bruno Rinvolucri) in Critical Cities: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists, Volume 2, ed. Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield (Myrdle Court Press, 2010), pp. 241-52

 

• ‘Mapping sewer space in mid-Victorian London,’ in Dirt: New Geographies of Dirt and Purity, ed. Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox (IB Tauris, 2007), pp. 123-37

 

• ‘“Monster sewers”: experiencing London’s main drainage system,’ in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths of Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott (Rodopi, 2007), pp. 9-32

 

Articles in academic journals:

​

• ‘Beyond domesticities: posthuman architectures for animals we farm,’ Architectural Design: Posthuman Architectures 94: 1 (2024), pp. 76-83

 

• ‘Sunken cities: climate change, urban futures and the imagination of submergence,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41: 6 (2017): 868-87

 

• ‘Digging up and digging down: urban undergrounds’ (with Carlos López Galviz and Bradley L. Garrett), Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2: 2, supplement (2016): 26-30 

 

• ‘Traversing the fantasies of urban destruction: ruin gazing in Varosha,’ CITY 19: 1 (2015): 44-60

 

• ‘Victorian market halls, ornamental iron and civic intent,' Architectural History 55 (2012): 173-97

 

• ‘City reading: the design and use of nineteenth-century London guidebooks,’ Journal of Design History 25: 2 (2012): 123-44

 

• ‘Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city,’ CITY 14: 4 (2010): 370-89

 

• ‘Dream reading? Designing and using Victorian gardening catalogues,’ Journal of the Printing Historical Society 15 (2010): 49-75

 

• ‘“Give in your account”: using and abusing Victorian census forms,’ Journal of Victorian Culture 14: 1 (2009): 1-25

 

• ‘Image and audience: contractual representation and London’s main drainage system,’ Technology and Culture 49: 3 (2008): 568-98

                                                        

• ‘Useful reading? Designing information for London's Victorian cab passengers,’ Journal of Design History 21: 2 (2008): 121-41        

 

• ‘Introduction,' (with Ben Campkin), Journal of Architecture 12: 4 (2007): 347-51

 

• ‘Architecture, ornament and excrement: the Crossness and Abbey Mills pumping stations,’ Journal of Architecture 12: 4 (2007): 353-65

 

• ‘Una rappresentazione di un ’ideologia dell’ improvement? Le mappe e il futuro delle fognature Londinesi, 1848-51,’ Storia Urbana 112 (2006): 113-39

 

• ‘Historicizing iron: Charles Driver and the Abbey Mills pumping station (1865-68),’ Architectural History 49 (2006): 223-56

 

• ‘Sewers, wood engraving and the sublime: picturing London’s main drainage system in the Illustrated London News, 1859-62,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 38: 4 (2006): 349-78

 

Exhibition catalogues:

 

• Designing Information Before Designers: Print for Everyday Life in the Nineteenth Century, with Paul Stiff and Mike Esbester (University of Reading, 2010)

 

Other articles:

​

• ‘Billions of birds collide with glass buildings – but architecture has solutions’, The Conversation, 16 October 2023, available at https://theconversation.com/billions-of-birds-collide-with-glass-buildings-but-architecture-has-solutions-215419

​

• Animal architecture: why we need to design buildings for wildlife as well as people’, The Conversation, 2 March 2023, available at https://theconversation.com/animal-architecture-why-we-need-to-design-buildings-for-wildlife-as-well-as-people-200879

​

• ‘Letters from the World’, Urban Wisdom Advancing with China 9 (2022): 102-3

​​

• ‘Dark speculation and the culture of design’,  LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture 16 (2022): 53-7

​​

• ‘Treehouse utopia’, DOPE 18 (2022): 4-5

​​

• ‘How anarchist architecture could help us build back better after COVID’, The Conversation, 26 January 2022, available at https://theconversation.com/how-anarchist-architecture-could-help-us-build-back-better-after-covid-170328

 

• ‘Empty cities have long been a post-apocalyptic trope – now, they are a reality’, The Conversation, 18 January 2021, available at https://theconversation.com/empty-cities-have-long-been-a-post-apocalyptic-trope-now-they-are-a-reality-153263

 

• 1851: Year Zero, e-book published by Machine Books, 2020

 

• ‘Future cities, fit for purpose,’ The Environment, December 2019, pp. 21-23

 

• ‘Yesterday’s tomorrow today: what we can learn from past urban visions,’ Guardian, 12 July 2019, available at https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/11/yesterdays-tomorrow-today-what-we-can-learn-from-past-urban-visions

 

• ‘London 2119,’ Bartlett 100, 8 May 2019, available at https://bartlett100.com/article/london-2119

 

• ‘Future cities: Architecture and the imagination,’ Public Seminar, 5 April 2019, available at http://www.publicseminar.org/2019/04/future-cities/

 

• ‘The entropic city,’ ISRF Bulletin, Spring 2019, pp. 17-23, available at https://issuu.com/isrf/docs/isrf_bulletin_issue_xviii/s/84858

 

• ‘How imagination will save our cities,’ Nautilus, 7 March 2019, available at http://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/how-imagination-will-save-our-cities

 

• ‘Ornament & purity: Macfarlane’s drinking fountains,’ Victorian Review, 44: 1 (2019): 15-18

 

• ‘Unmoored cities: what speculative futures exist for cities in the face of climate change?’, Medium, 15 August 2018, available at https://medium.com/@uclurbanlab/unmoored-cities-what-speculative-futures-exist-for-cities-in-the-face-of-climate-change-d8f365764a21

 

• ‘What is Manchester? One man’s journey to photograph a city’s essence,’ Guardian, 13 June 2018, available at https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jun/13/what-is-manchester-one-mans-mission-to-photograph-a-citys-essence

 

• ‘Into the zone: the ruins of Chernobyl,’ GDC Interiors Journal, 23 February 2016, available at https://www.gdcinteriors.com/chernobyl/

 

• ‘Rage against the machine: Victorian cast iron and its critics,’ GDC Interiors Journal, 11 December 2015, available at https://www.gdcinteriors.com/victorian-cast-iron/

 

• ‘Sheffield’s Park Hill: the tangled reality of an extraordinary Brutalist dream,’ Guardian, 14 August 2015, available at https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/14/park-hill-brutalist-sheffield-estate-controversial-renovation

 

• ‘The Thames Tunnel,’ Victorian Review 38: 1 (2013): 15-17

 

• ‘Pripyat and the death of the city,’ Stadt Bauwelt 48 (2010): 14-19

 

• Encyclopaedia of Consumption and Waste, contributing author (Sage, 2010)

 

• ‘Designing information before designers,’ with Paul Stiff and Mike Esbester, Baseline 58: 5 (2010): 6-11

 

• ‘The Victorian origins of information design,’ with Paul Stiff and Mike Esbester, Grafik 184 (2010): 47-51

​

• 'Designing information for Victorian London’s cab passengers,’ Ultrabold: the Journal of St Bride Library 7 (2009): 4-9

    

• Phaidon Compendium of Graphic Design, contributing author (Phaidon, 2009)  

                               

• ‘Designing information for everyday life, 1815-1914,’ with Paul Stiff and Mike Esbester, Ephemerist 141 (2008): 7-13

 

Book reviews:

 

• Joanna Hofer-Robinson, Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Nineteenth Century Contexts (2019): 1-2

 

• Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth (Yale University Press, 2015), Victorian Studies 58: 4 (2016): 760-61

 

• Catherine Jolivette (ed), British Art in the Nuclear Age (Ashgate, 2014), Technology and Culture 57 (2016): 488-90

 

• G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire 1840-1870 (Yale University Press, 2013), Visual Culture in Britain 15: 3 (2014): 372-74

 

• Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Ohio University Press, 2008), Technology and Culture 49: 4 (2008): 1055-57

 

• Jamie Benedickson, The Culture of Flushing: a Social and Legal History of Sewage (UBC Press, 2007), Technology and Culture 49: 1 (2008): 284-85

 

Published conference papers:

 

• ‘A Victorian ironworld: cast iron, ornament and Brighton,' in Nuts & Bolts of Construction History: Culture, Technology and Society, vol. 2, ed. Robert Carvais (Picard, 2010), pp. 565-72

 

• ‘Rational, magical or monstrous spaces? Press responses to London’s main drainage system, 1865-68,’ in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths of Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2007)

 

• ‘Representation and power? Constructing London’s main drainage system,’ in Studies in Urban History 31, ed. Lars Nilsson (Institute of Urban History, 2007)

 

Unpublished conference contributions:

​

• ‘Oystertecture: the motto of the mollusc,’ invited speaker,  Badgering Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Co-Habitating with Other Species, University of Rochester, New York, 10 May 2024

​

• ‘Dancing in the trees: from The Baron in the Trees to go Ape!,’ invited speaker, Tree Cultures: Words, Woods and Well-Being, Linnean Society, London, 29 February 2024

​ 

• ‘How to stop time: revisiting Varosha,’ invited speaker, Crumbling Worlds: Living in Ruins, Repairing Infrastrcutures, IFK, Veinna, 17-19 January 2024

​​​

• ‘Pollen: plant sex, allergies and architecture,’ Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence, Malta Society of Arts, Valletta, 27-29 September 2023

​

• ‘Strangling cities: aerial roots, architecture and the unruly agency of plants,’ Un/Building the Future: The Country and the City in the Anthropocene, University of Warwick, Coventry, 14-16 July 2023

​

• ‘Dead cities and the optical unconscious,’ invited speaker, Translating the Present: Science Fiction and our Futures, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 3-5 December 2020

 

• ‘Manchester: seeing like a city,’ keynote paper, Roots and Reach, annual postgraduate conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 4 March 2020

 

• ‘Postcards from the future: imagining cities and climate change,’ keynote paper, Imagining City Futures Across Disciplines, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, Finland, 19 November 2018

 

• ‘The dead city: allegories of empty London,’ invited speaker, Independent Social Research Foundation workshop, Berlin, September 2018

 

• Unmoored Cities: Radical Urban Futures and Climate Catastrophes (lead organiser and chair), 1-day conference at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, 24 May 2018

 

• 'Londons under London: mapping the city’s subterranean nightmares,’ invited speaker, Going Underground: Design, Reputation and Disorder in the Subterranean Infrastructure of the City, Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, Birkbeck College, London, 18 May 2018 

 

• ‘Carbon-sink cities: Wolf Hilbertz, Biorock and Autopia Ampere,’ Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference, Glasgow, June 2017

 

• ‘Drowned Londons: fiction, cities and climate change,’ Fiction and Social Imaginary, University of York, March 2016

 

• ‘Social ornament: iron on the street,’ keynote paper, Historical Metallurgy Society Annual Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon, June 2015

 

• ‘Dystopian ruin? London’s future submergence,' Brave New Worlds: The Dystopian in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Newcastle University, April 2015

 

• ‘Traversing the fantasies of urban destruction: ruin gazing in Varosha,' Narrating Ruin, Ruining Narrative: Co-Producing Sites, Materials and Stories, RGS-IBG International Conference, London, August 2014

 

• ‘40 years later: ruin gazing in Varosha,’ Big Ruins: The Aesthetics and Politics of Supersized Decay (lead organiser and chair), University of Manchester, May 2014

 

• 'Ornament and obscenity: cast iron and Victorian public toilets,’ invited speaker,. The Production of Ornament, University of Leeds, March 2014

 

• 'Londons under London: Neo-Victorian cartographies of horror,' Neo-Victorian Cultures: The Victorians Today, Liverpool John Moores University, July 2013

 

• 'Ornament and transience: iron, decoration and the railway station,' Rust, Regeneration and Romance: Iron and Steel Landscapes and Cultures, Ironbridge, July 2013     

                                        

• 'Function & Fantasy: the Aesthetics of Iron Architecture' conference session (organiser), 66th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Buffalo, USA, April 2013           

                 

• ‘Ornament unbound: Victorian decorative cast iron,’ Composition and Decomposition, British Association for Victorian Studies annual conference, University of Birmingham, September 2011

 

• ‘Ruin from below: mapping London’s subterranean nightmares,’ Imagining Spaces/Places, University of Helsinki, August 2011

 

• ‘The city in ruins: notes from Chernobyl and Pripyat,’ invited speaker, Refurbished Future, Industriebauseminar, TU Wien, Vienna, May 2011

 

• ‘Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city,’ Cold War Cities study day, Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, London, September 2010

 

• ‘Give in your account: reading pre-Victorian census form,;’ Writing Design, The Design History Society Annual Conference, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, September 2009

 

• ‘Petrified modernism? Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city,’ 78th Anglo- American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, London, July 2009

 

• ‘Useful reading? Designing information for London’s Victorian cab passengers,’ St Bride Library Conference, London, April 2009

 

• ‘Reading for navigation: maps and London guidebooks in the nineteenth century,’ 77th Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, London, July 2008

 

• ‘Combatting “fraudulent space:” Information design for London’s cab passengers, 1832-1914,’ Fifth Annual Conference on the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, Helmond, Netherlands, October 2007

 

• ‘Architecture and Dirt’ conference session (co-organised with Ben Campkin), 60th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Pittsburgh, USA, April 2007

 

• ‘Rational, magical or monstrous spaces? Press responses to London’s main drainage system, 1865-68,’ Third Global Conference, Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths of Enduring Evil, Budapest, Hungary, May 2005

 

• ‘Nobility and fear in the “public face” of London's sewerage system,’ Seventh International Urban History Conference, Athens, October 2004

 

• ‘Dialectic of construction/destruction: picturing London’s sewers, 1859-6,’ Fifth Annual Conference of the British Association for Victorian Studies, Keele University, October 2004

 

EXHIBITIONS

 

• Designing Information Before Designers (co-curated with Paul Stiff and Mike Esbester), Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, 22 February-15 April 2010; and St Bride Library, Bridewell Lane, London, 11-29 January 2010

​

TALKS AND LECTURES

​

• 'Ornament for export: iron-founders on the imperial stage', invited speaker, Commonwealth Heritage Forum, 29 May 2024 (online event)

​

• 'Animal architecture: building for co-habitation,' invited speaker, School of Architecture, University of Sassari, Italy, 16 January 2024

​

• ​​‘From cesspool to supersewer: placing London’s subterranean waste,’ invited speaker, Literary London Reading Group Seminar, 12 January 2021  (online event)

 

• ‘1851: year zero’, invited speaker, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 5 February 2020

 

• ‘Anarchist architecture: building from the bottom up’, invited speaker, School of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, 22 January 2020

 

• ‘The future(s) of Manchester’, invited speaker, Urbanisms I, 29 August 2019, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester

 

• ‘Sunken cities: climate-change fiction, art and architecture’, invited speaker, Situating Architecture lecture series, 8 October 2018, Bartlett School of Architecture, London

 

• ‘Underground Manchester: exploring the Irk culvert’, invited speaker, Beneath the City Streets, 1 March 2018, Sheffield Hallam University

 

• ‘Underground Manchester: exploring the city within’, invited speaker, Manchester cathedral, Manchester, 8 September 2016

 

• ‘Rage against the machine: Victorian cast iron and its critics’, invited speaker, Design by Choice: The Origins of Mass Customization in Europe, Bureau Europa, Maastricht, 17 January 2016

 

• ‘Ruins and the Romantic imagination’, invited speaker, Victorian Culture and Rise of Romanticism, John Rylands Library, Manchester, 27 November 2015

 

• ‘Talking underground’, invited panelist, Everybody Explore: The Problems and Possibilities of Growing Public Enthusiasm for Urban Exploration, Senate House, London, 13 November 2015

 

• ‘Rage against the machine’, invited speaker, Good Taste/Bad Taste?, RIBA, London, 27 October 2015

 

• ‘Cities of Void’, invited panelist, Passengerfilms, London, 11 August 2015

 

• ‘Men at work: visualising subterranean labourers in mid-Victorian London’, invited speaker, Perspectives on Ford Madox Brown’s Work, Manchester Art Gallery, 26 November 2014

 

• Apocalypse Now: Thinking about Ruins and Radiation (organiser, chair and contributor), study seminar for the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 28 November 2012

 

• Function and Fantasy: Decorative Iron and Victorian Architecture (organiser, chair and contributor), study day for the Victorian Society, Art Workers’s Guild, London, 24 March 2012

 

• ‘Into the belly of the beast: exploring London’s sewers,’ This is Not a Gateway annual festival, Hanbury Hall, London, 23 October 2010

 

• ‘Interactions with information: designing and reading in everyday life, 1815-1914,’ (with Paul Stiff and Mike Esbester), History of reading seminar series, Institute of English Studies, London, 22 March 2010

 

• ‘What lies beneath? The underground city,’ invited speaker, Oxford Castle Unlocked public talks, Oxford, 16 July 2009

 

• ‘Realizing “the Egyptian type of eternity:” sewage recycling in Victorian Britain,’ seminar series, Department of Economic & Social History, University of Glasgow, 23 October 2008

 

• ‘Out of sight, out of mind: representing London’s Victorian sewers,’ Centre for Metropolitan History seminar series, Institute of Historical Research, London, 17 October 2007

 

• ‘Bazalgette’s architect: the eccentric art of Charles Driver,’ The Victorian Society Winter 2006 Lecture Series, Art Workers’ Guild, London, 21 February 2006

 

RESEARCH & PUBLICATION GRANTS

​

• December 2021: Award from the Architecture Research Fund (UCL) towards the cost of  publishing Animal Architecture (£1441)

​​

• March 2018: Award from the Architecture Research Fund (UCL) towards the cost of publishing Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination (£531)

 

• April 2017: Award from the Architecture Project Fund (UCL) with UCL Urban Laboratory towards the cost of organising the conference Unmoored Cities: Radical Urban Futures and Climate Catastrophes (£2,878)

 

• October 2016: Senior Scholar Award from the Society of Architectural Historians to attend the annual conference of the Society in Glasgow, June 2017 (£750)

 

• February 2016: 8-month Independent Scholar Fellowship from the Independent Social Research Foundation (£10,920)

 

• October 2013: Award from the Paul Mellon Centre towards the cost of publishing Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain (£1500)

 

• May 2010: Two-year Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (c. £50,000)

 

• October 2008: Award from the Paul Mellon Centre towards the cost of publishing Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (£4402)

                                                    

• April 2008: Award from the Marc Fitch Fund towards the cost of publishing Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (£1000)

 

• January 2004 and January 2003: Jonathan Vickers Bursary from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (£12,000)

 

• January 2003-December 2005: Reading University Faculty Studentship (equivalent to full AHRC funding for doctoral research)

​

ACADEMIC SUPERVISION

​

• October 2022: External PhD examiner, Michael Coates, University of Sheffield, Sheffield. Thesis title: ‘The Architects' Revolutionary Council: Architectural anarchy in Britain & Ireland in the 1970s and how to destroy the R.I.B.A.’

 

• May 2022: External PhD examiner, Richard Morten, University of Central Lancashire, Preston. Thesis title: ‘Difficult Heritage in Post-Communist Space: the Case of the Buzludzha Memorial House in Bulgaria’

 

• April 2021: External PhD examiner, Heather L. Braiden, School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Thesis title: ‘Building landscape narratives: the material and visual culture of bridge construction in Montreal, 1854-1930’ 

 

MEDIA EXPERIENCE

​

• October 2023: Interviewee, Front Row (BBC Radio 4)

• July 2023: Interviewee, October Films, Maps of Britain, sewers (Channel 5)

• May 2023: Interviewee, October Films, Maps of Britain, canals (Channel 5) 

• May 2023: Interviewee, Knowing Animals podcast with Josh Milburn 

• December 2022: Panellist, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4 with Lord Melvin Bragg

• October 2022: Interviewee, A is for Architecture podcast with Ambrose Gillick

• February 2022: Panellist, ABC National Radio, Melbourne, ’Life Matters’

• January 2020: Interviewee, TRT World, Roundtable, ‘Floating Cities’

• December 2019: Interviewee, October Films, How the Victorians Built Britain

• April 2019: Interviewee, ABC National Radio, Melbourne, ’Blueprint for Living’

• November 2018: Interviewee, ICON Minds podcast,’The future of cities’ 

• June 2018: Interviewee, BBC North West

• April 2015: Contributor/interviewee, The Restoration Man (Channel 4)

• May 2014: Contributor to radio broadcast on London's sewers (Marketplace Productions)

• May 2006: Contributor, One Planet (BBC World Service)

 

WEBSITES

​

• The Stones of Manchester (creator and maintainer), www.stonesofmanchester.com

• Rag-picking history (creator and maintainer, 2008-2020), www.ragpickinghistory.co.uk