Personal Statement
My research bridges architectural history, cultural history and social history. I draw on visual and material culture, oral history and archival analysis to track the contested occupation, adaptation and re-use of built spaces over time. My PhD and forthcoming monograph (Routledge 2026) examine the history of private rented housing in London after the Second World War, showing how the capital's 'rented rooms' were a key site of intervention for the welfare state and a crucible of radical social change. Expanding on a longstanding interest in the 'afterlives' of buildings, landscapes and places, my current research explores the architecture and politics of post-disaster reconstruction and rehousing in Mauritius during the transition from British colony to independence. This work examines the connection between grassroots spatial practices and expert-led planning, involving some of the same personalities who shaped the housing futures of postwar London.

Before joining Liverpool School of Architecture as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 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 specialising in trusts and foundations, having worked for various charities focused on the built environment and other fields.

Research Overview
My current research offers a social-architectural history of post-disaster reconstruction, demonstrating how grassroots practices such as self-build housing and informal land settlement have interacted with state and corporate-led rebuilding. Based on a study of post-cyclone reconstruction in Mauritius during the transition from plantation colony to independence, I use archival research, oral history, maps and photography to challenge traditional beliefs about who has agency in making the built environment. The project articulates the links between grassroots spatial practices and large-scale transformative change, questioning the fixity of categories like traditional versus modern, local versus international, and vernacular versus mass-produced.

The contemporary context for the project is the way environmental disasters, driven partly by catastrophic climate change, continue to serve as the pretext for ‘blank slate’ reconstruction programmes that often exacerbate the legacy of colonial exploitation. Reacting against this tendency, critical voices from the field of humanitarian architecture have pressed for closer attention to grassroots spatial practices often deemed anathema to the project of modernisation. But the historically dynamic nature of these practices themselves, ranging from vernacular building cultures to informal land settlement, has largely eluded analysis. My project seeks to overcome these historical blindsides via a case study of post-cyclone reconstruction in the former British colony of Mauritius from 1945 to 1982.

This new work, supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, is a geographical departure from my PhD research on post-war London's 'rented rooms' but shares many of the same concerns - as well as a re-reading of works by individual 'experts' who crossed between London and Mauritius - in terms of how buildings and landscapes are variously laid claim to, cleared away, and reappropriated during periods of large-scale reconstruction. Bridging architectural history, cultural history and social history, my work draws on visual and material culture, oral history and archival analysis of records such as valuation lists, rent tribunals and registers of the dispalced to track the contested occupation, adaptation and re-use of built spaces over time.