About
As an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool, my research bridges architectural history, cultural history and urban history. My work so far has focused on the contested afterlives of built spaces during periods of social and physical reconstruction, with a particular interest in the politics of disasters, decolonisation and the welfare state. My recently published monograph ('Rented Worlds', Routeldge 2026) examines the history of private rented housing in London after the Second World War, showing how the capital's rented rooms became a crucible of radical social change.
Recent work at the University of Liverpool has traced the history of post-disaster reconstruction and shelter in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, during the transition from British sugar colony to independence. This work, with its consideration of sugarcane byproducts in construction and other material transactions, has prepared the ground for my current project as part of the Eiermann Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETH Zurich. The project re-situates the history of bio-renewable materials in design and construction within the crisis-ridden context of global/imperial trade, wartime strategy and post-war recovery, from the formal end of British free trade in 1931 to the closure of the UK Ministry of Supply in 1959.
Before joining Liverpool School of Architecture (first as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in October 2022), I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre and Development Manager at Open City, an architectural education charity dedicated to making London's built environment more open and accessible.
I have written on topics such as the aesthetics of the ‘un-ideal home’, the politics of postwar immigration and housing, subdivision in the private rented sector, and the role of rent tribunals as spaces of resistance for publications including the London Journal, Twentieth Century British History, Architectural Histories and Jacobin. A recent historical materialist account disaster thinking and reconstruction in the writings of Viollet-le-Duc appears in the edited collection 'Struggles in the Concrete' (Birkhauser 2025).
Alongside academic work, I am an experienced fundraiser and campaign organiser, having worked for various charities focused on the built environment and and anti-war causes.