About us

The Built Heritage research group investigates the human life of historic environments: the stories and myths told about it, the festivals performed in it, the trades still worked in it, and the people who keep and carry its culture into the future. We bring anthropology, conservation, history, urbanism, and creative practice into this fuller sense of the historic environment – from the study of buildings and streets to cities and the broader built environment. Four commitments run through the work: attending to living heritage; revealing hidden stories; thinking by hand; and turning fieldwork into policy. We are scholarly in the traditional sense, a group of writers with a shelf of monographs between us, yet unusually hands-on in how we go about our work. Manchester is our ground. From here our work reaches the festivals of Japan, the streets of Cairo and the coastline of Penang.

Across the group we hold a range of professional accreditations alongside our academic roles, reflecting the practice-facing side of our research. These include registration as architects with the Architects Registration Board (ARB), the Hellenic Chamber of Registered Architects, and the Order of Architects, Planners, Landscape Architects and Conservation Architects of the Province of Rome; accreditation as conservation professionals with the Institute of Historic Building Conservation (IHBC); Fellowships of the Higher Education Academy and the Institute of Place Management; and membership of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.

The group also carries a range of external research roles that extend our work beyond Manchester. Members have served as Executive Editor of Architecture and Culture, guest editor for Architecture (MDPI), and reviewers and assessors for the European Science Foundation. We hold honorary research fellowships at the Universities of Birmingham and Manchester, and an International Chair in Architecture at the Université libre de Bruxelles. We peer review for highly regarded journals including the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Journal of Architecture, Heritage & Society and Religions, as well as for publishers including Routledge and Springer. We sit on scientific committees of international conferences such as Architecture across Boundaries and the Asian Conference on Cultural Studies, including chairing the 2024 Architecture across Boundaries conference at XJTLU.