I'm the kind of person who loves learning about a lot of different things, so when I went to university, studying Geography felt like a way to keep the breadth that I really enjoy. I studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, starting in late 2020. 

Starting university during the pandemic had its quirks, but a real positive was just how much I loved the subject and becoming fascinated with place as a concept. Studying Geography helped me see that places aren't just passive backdrops for our day-to-day lives, they actively shape how we live. At the same time, we are continuously remoulding and reimagining them, sometimes for better and sometimes for the worse. 

When I left university, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but was fortunate to stumble across a listing for a role in high street regeneration for Bath & North East Somerset Council. I worked primarily in Bath, where I grew up, delivering regeneration projects which supported the city centre. It was intriguing to work in a place that I knew so well, while learning more about the layers of a city that has been occupied since Roman times, with each generation building on top of the last. My role was very varied, ranging from running meanwhile-use projects, commissioning artists, to calling up pest control when a local rat population started chewing through the Christmas lights (potentially a less glamorous side of the job!). 

When you work in local government, you end up doing a lot of engagement work, talking to local communities about the changes coming to the places they live and how they feel about it. It gave me a real appreciation of how fiercely protective people are of the places that they love, and how resistance often stems from a sense of losing control over their place’s future. I became increasingly interested in how to ensure that change, which is inevitable, will benefit the greatest number of people and genuinely serve the communities that will experience it. 

Alongside my job, I was also able to do some travelling, a highlight of which was doing a writing course in Tokyo in 2024. I was amazed by the scale of the city, but also how peaceful it felt in many places. I also loved the way that old and new exist alongside each other in a way that feels so natural. 

At this point, I'd become clear that working in the built environment was the right path for me. After nearly two years of working in regeneration in Bath, I was keen to move to London. I'd been aware of Stories’ work for a while, and had grown up very close to the Mayday Saxonvale project in Frome (including sneaking into the old derelict site for a GCSE photography project as a teenager). When a job came up, I jumped at the chance to apply and have been lucky enough to work at Stories since August 2025.