CV / Resumé
High and sustained output
Completed PhD in thirty-nine months while:
- working several part-time jobs;
- participating in extra-curricular activities (enterprise/startup related), and;
- writing a novel manuscript.
Preconception to Participation: Young people’s experience of public library architecture
[Architectural history and theory doctoral thesis]
How do individual and collective experience map onto useage of a complex information/digital/physical hybrid nexus: the central public library?
+ Retained performance under pressure
Prior to PhD viva, commenced post-doctoral research associate post in a new field – the creative economy.
Learned new context and created and delivered a research project exceeding required deliverables in five months while successfully preparing and defending PhD viva, while also fending off burn out.
Accessing Cardiff’s Hidden Creative Economy
[Project report]
The digital revolution has created opportunities for creativity to influence workplaces by increasing the competitiveness bonus of creativity. How does this manifest?
+ Rapid adaptation
Learned 3D modelling by building a model of a car in Blender, a particularly difficult challenge.
~8 weeks of evenings and weekends from picking up the program to completed model.

Week 1 – Nov 2022

Week 8 – Jan 2023
Principles
Creativity
Lifelong learning
The value of associations of people whose personalities and abilities complement
Recent speaking
Image from RIBA
Image from RTPI
Articles

Out of Office: Planning Professionals in the Classroom
RTPI NW e-Bulletin & IHBC Newsblog
An article about the involvement of Cumberland Council with Manchester School of Architecture’s Infrastructure Space Atelier, and the value of professionals getting out of the office in order to teach and engage with students.

Artificial Realities
The Planner Online
Series of four articles exploring the impacts and issues surrounding generative AI for planning and placemaking
Its home is The Planner Online, web magazine of the Royal Town Planning Institute.
Employment
Development Management
Cumberland Council
Cumberland Council is a local authority located in the north-west of England around and within the stunning Lake District National Park World Heritage Site.
We have some 4500 employees.
We are a local planning authority, meaning that for residents in our juristiction, we receive and process planning applications, and have responsibility for managing change to the built environment.
- How to repair a listed house;
- How to make an application for listed building consent;
- How to specify a new sash window.
But there’s much more to it than that, including:
- How to help multi-million pound Regeneration [1] projects move forward by providing early advice on heritage impact;
- How to help Planning Policy’s [2] local plan evidence base with heritage impact assessment and conservation area appraisals;
- How to successfully defend that plan at examination;
- How to make visiting artists [3] and students feel welcomed and inspired by showing them our area.

[3] Public speaking: In conversation with artist Yelena Popova and curator Aldo Rinaldi
College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science
Cardiff University
The Creative Economy Team works to create a stronger creative sector in Cardiff, capital of Wales.
- “Accessing Cardiff’s Hidden Creative Economy” was an ambitious project requiring design and delivery of research activities in a short space of time to better understand a city’s hidden creative economy: those people working creative jobs outside its creative industries.
- This required immersion in a new subject area, recruitment of substantial numbers of participants from the public, private and third sector, design and delivery of interviews and a questionnaire, commissioning of transcription, organisation and delivery of a two-hour review seminar including lunch, analysis of data and production of a detailed 70-page project report.
- This project was run on a condensed timeframe, and relied on adaptability, energy, familiarity with tools and processes, and good time management.
Cardiff University
Cardiff’s Welsh School of Architecture is rated the second best architecture school in the country in the Guardian’s 2023 rankings
Two projects:
-
- Field data collection team, making observation of characteristics of the built environment and recording them using a custom app.
- Collection of field data relating to attitudes towards plastic bag charging using the repertory grid technique. This method derives from the personal construct theory of psychologist George Kelly, and is used to understand how people construe topics of interest.
Education
Master of Arts (2017-2018)
University of York
Accredited by the Institute of Historic Building Conservation. I am a full member of the IHBC (and an affiliate member of the Royal Town Planning Institute).
My dissertation focused on craft skills and education within the heritage sector.
Doctor of Philosophy (2012-2016)
Cardiff University
Innovative research on three of the UK’s biggest and most modern public libraries
I believe in the socio-spatial. How do people and place make one another?
Participants were young people aged 16-25 from different backgrounds. How do they view the library, and percieve its possibilities?
To answer this, we went on walks together, with the young person taking photos to “frame” our conversation – a journey from city to service.
This was audio recorded, the recording transcribed, and the transcription coded through content analysis.
Accompanying photos frame the talk, act as prompting in focus group card sorting, and illustrate the thesis itself.
These walk-alongs and focus groups were supplemented with sitting interviews with library staff, achieving triangulation:
- three participant groups (library staff, university students, and young people from a youth group)
- three complementary research methods (walk-alongs, sitting interviews, group card sorting)
- three different cities (Cardiff, Worcester, Liverpool)
Preconceptions and culture guide our relationships to space; socio-spatial relationships enacted in and around a place influence participation; wayfinding activities help or hinder use, from goal-driven searching to informal browsing.
The thesis received only minor corrections, which took a few hours to complete. To deliver outreach, I ran a 1-hr session for the annual conference of CILIP* Cymru, facilitating discussion with a packed room of delegates on what makes good library design.
*Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
Master of Engineering (2007-2011)
University of Nottingham
Undergraduate master’s degree accredited by the Royal Institute of British Architects, Architects’ Registration Board, and Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers. This combined the architecture undergraduate course with a building services engineering course to form a demanding and wide-ranging programme that subsumed studio work, history and theory, engineering mathematics, and building services design.
Additional Experience
RTPI AI Advisory Board (2024-)
I participate in occasional meetings with the other members. The pupose of the advisory board is to have input on the RTPI’s internal research on AI use and adoption within the sector, and to keep abreast of useful developments.
Work Experience, Specialised Automotive Services (2024-)
I spend a day a week at SAS, a special place that does nut-and-bolt restorations of valuable classics, modern vehicle maintenance and repair, high quality paint and body work, and more. While there, I observe, assist and learn from the technicians as they identify and solve problems on a huge array of some of the world’s coolest cars.

I built and now run this website (2023-)
Independent fiction author (2016-2017)
- Self-published a novel and novella on Kindle, Kobo, iBooks, etc.
- Developed marketing scheme and website with Mailchimp integration
- Runner-up in the University of Nottingham’s inaugural Alumni Short Story Competition (2017)
- Attended Jericho Writers’ annual Creative Writing Festival in York (2019)
Original art
Imaginary harbour scene from reference images. Fineliners on tracing paper (2022)

Imagined Worlds – Patreon site for writing unrelated to AI
Images are my own digital paintings (2016-17)

Volunteering with the Churches Conservation Trust at St John’s in Lancaster, a brilliant but vulnerable mid-18th century “preaching box” church that is one of the Trust’s flagship regeneration projects, in collaboration with the local Chamber of Commerce and others. St John’s will be getting a new lease of life as a co-working and community events space, bringing it back into use while retaining its original box pews.

Want to get in touch?
If you’d like to talk about work, send me a personalised connection request via LinkedIn