I grew up in rural Lincolnshire as the son of a carpenter and joiner, which meant building sites were part of life long before architecture school. During the 1990s I worked as a construction volunteer with Frontiers Foundation in Northern Ontario, Canada, helping Indigenous communities construct timber-framed homes, and later with APARE restoring historic churches and a castle in France and Belgium.
I studied architecture at Leeds Polytechnic and the Bartlett before working at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. I later co-founded the architectural practice HUT, which I ran for ten years, before leaving amicably—I rank my exit as being one of my greatest achievements in architecture!
Today, I am an architect and architectural educator whose work explores the relationship between architectural education, professional practice and the realities of building construction. I have mentored many young architects through the difficult transition from academia to practice.
I have also taught at the University of Westminster for 15 years, developing the Site Diary module, requiring architecture students to repeatedly visit live construction sites. The project forms the basis of my research ‘Sites of Learning: Building Site Learning in Architectural Education’.
I am also slowly completing the retrofit of my own 1970s house in St Albans, a project that has won awards and may one day actually be finished!
