I am a design historian with a special interest in how we experience designed landscapes. My research investigates how landscape and the natural environment evoke feelings and memories and shape our behaviour, and how design and art interventions can change those experiences.

I began my career as an art editor and picture researcher in book publishing, and following an MA in the History of Design, I founded my own event management and tours business which I combined with part-time teaching. Following the completion of my PhD in 2010 I became Senior Lecturer and then Reader in the History of Design at Buckinghamshire New University, where I lead the Visual and Material Culture modules studied by our art and design students.

My book ‘The Factory in a Garden’. A History of Corporate Landscapes from the Industrial to the Digital Age (Manchester University Press, February 2017) is the first comprehensive design and cultural history of recreational landscapes for industry in Britain and the United States. Find a synopsis in the link above.

Cover of ‘The Factory in a Garden’

I am also working on the history of the design and furnishing of urban public space and you will soon be able to read my chapter ‘The Public Setting’ in The Cultural History of Furniture in the Modern Period edited by Dr. Claire O’Mahony, (Bloomsbury, December 2017). You will find a list of my other publications and details of other research projects in the main menu above.

My great, great grandfather, glass manufacturer James Timmins Chance of Chance Brothers in Smethwick, Birmingham, the largest manufacturer of window and plate glass in the middle of the nineteenth century, undoubtedly inspired my long-standing interest in industrial and social history. The firm not only supplied all the glass for the Crystal Palace in London, but also the Houses of Parliament and the Westminster Clock Tower that houses Big Ben.