I was born in Reading, and educated at Ridgeway Primary, Ashmead School, Lancaster University (BA, MA) and the University of Warwick (PhD 1989)
I’ve worked for the Institute of Historical Research, the Open University, the University of Bedfordshire and the University of Westminster. I’ve received funding awards from the ESRC, the AHRB, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, Buzz Net, the Anglo-Daiwa Foundation and the Nomura Foundation.
My research interests began with the social history of betting and gambling in England and moved to the social and urban history of suburbs, suburban growth and new towns, and urban reconstruction following aerial bombardment.
Against orthodoxies in Higher Education, I’ve argued that most gambling was and is moderate; that suburbs are popular and cool places to live for most suburbanites; and that despite the ‘new’ in new towns they have a fascinating history, and made an important contribution to reconstruction in postwar England.
My research is internationally recognised. I’ve been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian and Japanese, and have given conference and seminar papers in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the UK and the USA.
Media interviews and contributions: BBC Radio 4 on Jonathan Freedland’s ‘Taking the Long View’ (1999; Clare Balding’s ‘Sport and the British’, the episode ‘A Bit of a Flutter’ was titled after my book (2012); ‘Suburbia’ on Radio 4 Extra, interviewed by Simon Fanshawe (2015); ‘You and Yours’ on new towns (2016); Laurie Taylor’s ‘Thinking Allowed’ (2018); various contributions to Radio 4 news items; BBC World Service; Radio 5; BBC 3 Counties Radio; Sky News; Channel 5, Phil Spencer’s History of Britain in 100 homes (2019); BBC2, Real Peaky Blinders (2022. I was also invited to contribute to the acclaimed documentary Suburban Steps to Rockland, shown on TV channels across the world; it’s also a CD. I was interviewed by Westdeutschen Rundfunk on Middle England and Brexit for an audio-podcast Brexitania (Munster, 2022) co-edited by Robert Tonks and Zacharia Rahmani. I’ve also been quoted in The Economist a couple of times.
Well-known writers who have cited my work include Jeremy Paxman in The English: A Portrait of a People (2007), Michael Ondaatje in his novel Warlight (2018), and Dominic Sandbrook in State of Emergency &c. (2010)
Moreover, my article ‘The English New Towns since 1946: What are the Lessons of their History for their Future’, first published in the French journal Histoire Urbaine, was chosen to accompany the photographs in Raoul Reiss, The New Towns (2021), a fascinating collection of photos of the postwar English new towns.