My research explores the way that anxieties about the cognitive impacts of urban environments on attention influenced the spatial form of cities, from 1800 to the present. Within this, I am particularly interested in the way that shifting aesthetic ideas of natural beauty have changed the relationship between green and grey spaces in cities.
I trace these ideas into the present day, which gives my work a strong activist-research component. Using methods drawn from both the arts and humanities and the spatial social sciences, I track the ways that current and emerging policy to preserve biodiversity is reshaping the places where we live, to the exclusion of alternative visions of nature. I am currently working with a range of community groups who are trying to oppose the development of ecologically sensitive sites for housing, seeking to understand how their ways of viewing and narrating ‘everyday nature’ are getting lost within an increasingly technocratic and quantitative approach to biodiversity loss.
I am Co-Investigator on an interdisciplinary £1m ESRC-funded bid, which explores both the scientific, social, and aesthetic impacts of new policy. My work charts the way that new conflicts over the definition of ‘natural beauty’ are now emerging in response to policy-oriented definitions of biodiversity and the changing economics of ecological mitigation and enhancement. I hope that this work shows that clashes over aesthetics are not merely decorative, but have real and practical implications for efforts to prevent biodiversity loss.
Alongside this, I am a creative writer: my coauthored book Nature’s Calendar: the British Year in 72 Seasons, published by Granta, takes an interdisciplinary approach to everyday nature, bringing together science, social science and arts and humanities to reenchant familiar species. I am part of a team producing an exhibition on this theme at the Bodleian in 2026.
I am continuing this work with a second commercial book, also for Granta. It is about ‘calendar customs’: strange rituals that mark various days of the year, the exact meaning of which has often been lost. I am particularly interested in the way that these entangle human and natural beings in unusual ways, and what this tells us about our changing relationship to the natural world.