I fell in love with architecture studying Ancient History, on a project exploring how classical buildings were often tools of political propaganda and PR, as well as things of great beauty. There is so much information to be read from a building if you know where to look.

During my MA in Heritage Management, I interned with the Historic American Buildings Survey in Washington, DC. While there, I wrote a report on the Perry Belmont Mansion, an incredible Gilded Age Beaux-Arts house which takes up an entire city block, and is now the International Temple of the Order of the Eastern Star. In my research I discovered this was a building widely attributed to Paul-Ernest Sanson and Horace Trumbauer, but that a significant amount of the work was done by Julian Abele, the first African American to be admitted to the University of Philadelphia school of architecture.

My PhD focused on more modest homes; the ‘normal’ middle-class buildings of London in the 19th and 20th centuries. I spent a lot of time in vernacular houses, as well as trawling through a wide variety of archive sources for clues about how homes from mansion flats to urban cottages were designed and lived in.

I’m based in Cardiff, myself living in an Edwardian terrace which I am slowly renovating - so I understand the exquisite pain of a historic building project on a personal level!