Profession: Creative Director
City: London
Country: United Kingdom

What inspired you to want a life in Architecture and the creative industries?:
Although I started out wanting to be an artist, I’ve always loved exploring interiors, architecture and design, and this eventually led to a commission in 2000 to write a weekly column for the Independent called ‘Who’s in the House?’ We explored a huge range of buildings around the UK – from a women’s prison, to an RAF base and design classics such as HighPoint in Highgate. For the next twenty years, I carried on exploring homes and studios around the UK – interviewing artists, designers and architects – and wrote four books on art and design. I really love working in this kind of collaborative way.

Who inspired you in finding your path to Architecture/Film and the creative industries?:
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, I met up with the Trustees of the Grimshaw Foundation over zoom – we wanted to find a way to create workshops and activities online for young people and students working from home. We launched our website and held our first event at the Grimshaw studio called ‘Can Eggs Fly?’ – we all had to wear face-masks and somehow make it work – Muyiwa Oki (now RIBA President) was one of our volunteers and had to judge the flying egg competition. All of our volunteers showed up early on Saturday morning, to make sure that this free workshop could happen – I was really impressed that there was this commitment from the beginning to working with young people.

How you unlock obstacles and overcome bias in your work?:
I try to talk to as many young people as possible – I’ve been really inspired by the NY-LON and HomeGrown Plus cohort – in particular Emily Foster (AHMM), Carmel Simmonds (Architecture Apprentice of the Year 2023) and Tom Durham (Grimshaw).

What improvements do you feel are required to promote effective change in the academic and working environment?:
At Grimshaw Foundation we’ve worked with 14 secondary schools around London, as part of their Key Stage 3 curriculum – our aim is to encourage more students to go on to study Art or DT GCSE – and to realise that creativity and innovation can lead to so many creative careers. We’ve held two careers events at the Grimshaw studio for Years 10, 11, 12 to connect to over 70 creative careers – from AI to architecture, model-making, graphic design, film and photography.

We work with Urban Learners to develop our education programmes – and I think our next steps will be to recognize all of the amazing Art and DT teachers (including Neil Pinder!) who make this work possible!