I am a part-time PhD researcher studying how English Lake District pocket guidebooks and the leisure practice of fellwalking in the area have shaped each other from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. My thesis speaks to an element of the identity of the English Lake District by telling the story of the way in which pocket guidebooks increase access to the landscape by outsiders. My talk on Alfred Wainwright's Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells in the University of Cumbria's Cultural Landscape series 2021-22 is available here . 

Current Thesis Title ‘A Day on the Mountains’: A history of how English Lake District pocket guidebooks and the leisure practice of fellwalking in the area have shaped each other from Harriet Martineau’s Complete Guide to the English Lakes (1855) to Alfred Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells (1966 )

BA (Hons) History, University of Cambridge (1985-88)

I am currently involved in The Armitt Museum's Pull of the Fells Exhibition, 2022, talking about the different ways in which guidebooks have characterised Striding Edge on Helvellyn. Its portrayal illuminates changes in perceptions of landscape, the development of fell walking as a leisure pursuit associated with the emergence of modern mass tourism in the English Lake District and innovations in mapping and print technology which offered guidebooks the apparatus to guide their readers more accurately and in turn altered their content. 

Winner, Centre for Printing History and Culture, Peter Isaac Essay Prize (2022)

'Wainwright in Academia', Footsteps, The Wainwright Society Magazine, Winter 2021/22

Russell Gurney Scholarship and Margaret Hastings Prize, Girton College, University of Cambridge (1986)