From my height, I see a wider world;
through my blue eyes, I reimagine it…

Advertising photography

My main profession - making imaginative images for advertising agencies and magazines in London, Paris, Johannesburg, São Paulo, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (where I have been for more than thirty-five years). The images were key to a campaign’s success - and to the standing of the people who commissioned them.

Design & the built environment

As a naïve sixteen-year-old straight from a UK boarding school, I found a fortnight as a draughtsman at Rolls-Royce was enough - a sea of identical drawing boards stretching into the distance was not a life I could face. I found my way instead to a small arts-and-crafts college, and from there to one of the leading art colleges of its day, training in communication and design. A range of design work since - including time in the Conran design world, and building custom homes from the ground up.

Privileged in my education, but with little experience of anything beyond it, I felt an inner restlessness pulling me off the path that had been chosen for me, until I blindly found my own.

Pedestrian-safety crash research

Contracted to the Transport & Road Research Laboratory, working on the British Leyland SRV5 - a 1970s safety prototype - analysing high-speed film to find the force at which the human body breaks. An ideal position to put my talents and curiosity to use, for the thrill of researching as part of a team.

The thresholds we measured - the point at which bone and tissue fail - became the evidence base for better design profiles and the pedestrian-impact standards now built into every car sold in Europe. UK pedestrian deaths have fallen from roughly eight a day then to about one today.

Perhaps the aptitude is inherited. A distant relative of mine, Mary Edwards of Ludlow (c. 1750-1815), spent some forty years as a human “computer” for the Board of Longitude, working out by hand the lunar tables in the Nautical Almanac that let a ship’s master find his longitude at sea. She was among the very few women in Georgian England paid for scientific work in her own name, and among the better paid of anyone doing it. Her daughter Eliza carried it on after her. A lifetime of arithmetic, done correctly, so that strangers at sea would know where they were.

Bonded courier, special operations

Three years with Loomis International carrying cash letters, diplomatic papers and high-value instruments through Europe, into the Middle East and over the Atlantic, against the Federal Reserve’s daily clock - the youngest on a team of hardened ex-servicemen with pasts they never spoke of. That maturing youth only wanted to see the world, never imagining he would be let into the inner workings of global banking.

For the giants of world finance in the 1970s - the analogue dawn of modern money and technology, before the fax machine, let alone the likes of FedEx.

Native plant conservation & restoration

Years of restoration work in Northern California - seed sourcing, propagation, and the long patience of bringing native habitat back on public and protected ground. Along the way, designing and building an aquaponics system, and running an educational nursery growing vegetable seedlings.

Work with the National Park Service, the Sierra Club, Save the Bay, Hoopa Tribal Forestry, and Marin Master Gardeners.

Software & web systems

Designing and building database-driven web portals end to end - front-end, API, and admin tooling - with a bias for clean, readable interfaces.

My early days were at Planet Point, a boutique web-design and development studio in Oakland in the early-to-mid 2000s, building for commercial artists and film-production companies: searchable artist portfolios, e-commerce stores, and password-protected screening rooms and press kits that let film-makers share dailies and manage distribution. It was built in ColdFusion (Allaire, then Macromedia, then Adobe) - the go-to tool for rapid, dynamic web work long before WordPress - and we had a hand in its development, running early builds against real client work and feeding what we found back to the people building it.

Racing machines: form and function

I suppose my respect for skilled engineering is what drew me into the world of racing, alongside my other careers - manufacturing racing frames and engine parts, and now specialising in former Grand Prix-winning machines. Always pulled towards machines that are as beautiful as they are useful.

Restoration, fabrication, and the history behind each marque.

Rural Shropshire, my roots

Born to a hill-farming family above the medieval market town of Ludlow. The chapter I’m setting out on now is my own ground: family land in the Welsh Marches brought back into careful stewardship, with traditional land management and native botany in the spirit of Robert Hart’s forest gardening.

Flora & Field Stewardship - Marches Conservation, in its early days.

Core values

Originality & curiosity. Thinking beyond the conventional, questioning the status quo, and constantly seeking new perspectives.

Continuous improvement. A relentless desire to make things better - in my own work, and in the lives of others.