I came to planning through its history. At university I studied how European nineteenth-century cities were reshaped by successive waves of demolitions, infrastructure projects and public health interventions, producing new types of deliberately planned urban spaces across the continent.
My final research project investigated and mapped the ‘in-between’ spaces inadvertently created by nineteenth-century London’s rapid development: roadside verges, railway arches, gaps between speculatively developed terraces. These spaces, widespread across London, were often heavily relied upon public space, remembered as market grounds, political arenas and children’s play areas. Because they were unnamed and undefined on maps, their role in daily life can be far harder to systematically recover than that of the new stations, parks and boulevards on my syllabus, but their stories are no less interesting.
At Prior + Partners, my role sits between the Planning and Place Economics teams, where I work to bring together different evidence types to understand places, tell their stories and plan for their future. My background in urban history guides how I approach every project, whether a brownfield regeneration scheme or an entirely new settlement: my first step is always to look for clues about where the messy, undefined, and often most exciting, parts of a place might be.