I have a strong interest in tracing how industrial landscapes change over long time scales, and how conceptions of temporality – and understandings of the past in particular – shape how such places are used today.
My current research project (Reimagining British Waste Landscapes) investigates how waste materials such as mine spoil, slag, garbage, and soil have been used to create new landscapes across the UK since the Industrial Revolution and examines how these places are used and valued today. Understanding this (re)use of waste as a creative process, the project studies land-reclamation, dumping, and the creation of artificial hills using a mixed methodology (including survey, archival research, visual analysis, and ethnography using interviews, participatory drawing/mapping, and photography). The project will reveal both the physical traces of waste-led landscape modification and examine how people engage with these ‘artificial’ places in the Anthropocene. This research is funded by The Leverhulme Trust and Edinburgh College of Art (University of Edinburgh).
My doctoral research at the UCL Institute of Archaeology considered the role of heritage in international mega events (e.g. the Great Exhibition of 1851, New York World’s Fairs and London 2012 Olympic/Paralympic Games). This examined event sites’ histories, their organisers and opponents’ use of concepts of time and temporality, and what traces are left of mega events years, decades and centuries after they close their doors.
I am currently writing a monograph for UCL Press entitled, A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events: from The Great Exhibition to London 2012 and has also published numerous articles and book chapters based on the PhD research. I also contribute to the development of The Groundbreakers, a National Lottery Heritage Fund funded walking trail and App that will present the history of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London.
My other research interests include documenting the long-term persistence of unwanted or ‘waste’ materials, the role of archaeological materials as a form of ‘contamination’, lost rivers, the ethics of commercial archaeology practice, and the use of heritage in urban development projects.
