About
Ever since a small boy, I have been fascinated by the oldest buildings in our midst – churches, castles, ruined abbeys and their surroundings. They are our links to a Britain of centuries and even millennia ago and offer so many clues as to how people lived in past times. I have been lucky enough to build a career around such treasured heritage assets.
I have authored or co-authored some 18 books and about 180 peer-reviewed papers and reports, mostly on the medieval period and mostly on sites in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the East Midlands more generally. The book of which I’m most proud is Summoning St Michael (2006), co-written with Paul Everson, my longstanding collaborator. That work, on key developments in eleventh-century church architecture, draws on my interdisciplinary perspective and I believe is genuinely innovative.
My most popular book is England’s Landscape: The East Midlands (2006), which, in many respects, is a personal statement on the meaning I attach to the historic landscape and its buildings. The work that remains in greatest use, though, is City by the Pool (2003) – an archaeology of Lincoln, interwoven with a highly innovative heritage management system called LARA, still in use by City of Lincoln Council and imitated by others. It was written jointly with Alan Vince, Mick Jones and John Herridge.
My career began, however, with my MA dissertation, which pioneered a methodology for dealing with loose stones excavated from a York monastic site and which suggested how one could date and reconstruct the buildings from which these stones came.
The method proved fundamental to understanding the construction and destruction of monasteries, as well as stone-built structures of other types. During the great period of rescue archaeology, from the late 1960s to early 1990s, enormous amounts of similar architectural masonry were excavated and this methodology could be applied to it. I started on the York backlog with an appointment to the York Archaeological Trust, then headed by Peter Addyman and Richard Hall. With Richard Morris, I published the Council for British Archaeology practical handbook on the subject in 1987, along with several other papers on this subject.
A highlight of my time at English Heritage was the establishment of a county archaeology network in North East England. I was in the casework section then, when the principal of ‘the polluter pays’ for archaeological excavations and heritage-based building survey prior to redevelopment, was being established. To achieve this goal, it was necessary not just for each planning authority to have access to a professional archaeologist, but for that officer to have national government support within the planning process. The south of England had had good coverage for years; the Midlands were patchy, but in the north – my beat – the situation was shaky, with those few archaeologists in post mostly tangential to the planning process. I set up a proper network, so that every planning authority and national park had access to an effective archaeologist, well connected with the planning process.
When I moved to Monuments Protection in the Chief Inspector’s Division of English Heritage, in addition to a substantial casework load across the Midlands, I held policy responsibility for statutory heritage designations within various categories of heritage sites nationally. Historic towns and industrial heritage were of especial importance and for both categories I developed frameworks for the statutory (and non-statutory) protection of heritage assets.
I left English Heritage in 2012 and was appointed to the Heritage Lottery Fund’s East Midlands Committee the following year. This was an entirely different heritage experience, where I learned so much about the broader social and cultural significance of our heritage. It was enormously enjoyable too, assisting community groups to undertake projects that preserved and enlivened the heritage that was meaningful to them, and celebrating with them on completion. Then from 2018 to 2024, I was appointed to the HLF Board as a Trustee – again, a very different yet equally rewarding role, especially as it was an intense period of restructuring under the then CEO, Ros Kerslake.
Then COVID hit – and we were ready to cope, as part of our restructuring process had been to become a fully digital organization! This was another hectic period: central government tasked us with overseeing the Cultural Recovery Fund and DEFRA Recovery Fund, and I was one of the small number of Trustees sitting on the advisory panels for the disbursement of funds. We also established the Cultural Assets Fund, whose aim was to reduce the loss of heritage assets through the financial impact of the pandemic. We were able to keep huge numbers of heritage sites functioning, particularly heritage railways and cathedrals. I was also privileged to be part of the team devising the (renamed) National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Strategy 2033. Throughout my time on the Board, I worked closely with the staff of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, as their representative on the main Board, aiming to ensure their work was more closely integrated with that of the NLHF.
I feel immensely grateful for the opportunity to have played a role at the very highest echelons of heritage policy in our country. I continue to be active in heritage governance at regional level, both as a trustee and as an advisor on the conservation and use of heritage sites. And I continue to write …!