Historic England Advisory Committee

Membership

Professor Helena Hamerow - Chair

Anna Bond
Patricia Brown
Nick Collins
Stafford Critchlow
Nicole Crockett
Elizabeth Darling
Ben Derbyshire
George Ferguson
Tanvir Hassan
Mark Gardiner
Jon Grantham
Peter Hinton
Matthew Lloyd
Professor Peter Mandler
Richard Pollard
Stephen Schwendel Smith
Neal Shashore
Professor Tarek Teba
Marc Timlin
Alasdair Travers
Zac Tudor
Cordula Zeidler

Biographies

Professor Helena Hamerow, Chair

Helena Hamerow is Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in the settlements, farming practices and economy of northwest Europe during the Early Middle Ages. She is a Fellow of St Cross College, where she was Vice-Master from 2005 to 2008, and an Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.

Helena has previously served on the Board of Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum and the Board of Curators of the Bodleian Libraries and was an elected member of the Council of the University of Oxford from 2016 to 2020. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a former President of the Society for Medieval Archaeology and Vice-President of the Royal Archaeological Institute.

She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Oxford Archaeology and the Board of Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Helena is a Historic England Commissioner and a member of the Historic Estates Conservation Committee.

Anna Bond

Anna is responsible for delivering commercial and social benefit through her role as Head of Western Corridor at SEGRO. This is a c£5 billion portfolio of real estate assets covering Thames Valley and the Heathrow area. Prior to this Anna was an Executive Director at Grosvenor responsible for the UK development portfolio including Grosvenor’s Mayfair and Belgravia Estates.

Anna chairs BusinessLDN’s Planning and Development Advisory Forum.

Anna holds an honours degree in Land Management from the University of Reading and is a qualified member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

Nick Collins

Nick is a Director of Portico Heritage. He has thirty years experience in the property sector, including working with KMHeritage and as a Project Director in the conservation team at Alan Baxter. Nick spent nine years at Historic England as an Inspector of Historic Buildings & Areas and Team Leader working on a wide range of heritage projects across London.

Previously Conservation Officer at the London Borough of Bromley, Nick began his career at real estate consultancy, JLL as a Chartered Surveyor. This experience has given him an in-depth understanding of the property industry, listed building and planning on both sides of the development management process.

Nick is a member of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. He is an external examiner for the Oxford Brookes’ Masters in Historic Conservation and sits on the Council of the Cornish Buildings Group. He previously sat on the Southwark Diocesan Advisory Committee and has been a trustee of the Twentieth Century Society and the Heritage of London Trust.

Stafford Critchlow RIBA FRSA

Stafford Critchlow is an architect and director of international practice Wilkinson Eyre. Many of his projects have involved listed buildings or new buildings in sensitive locations, including the Forum at the University of Exeter with a long-span timber grid shell roof in a protected landscape, the Earth Sciences building in Oxford, and two repurposing projects in Bristol: ‘We the Curious’ science centre in a former GWR goods shed and the university Fry Building as a new home for the School of Mathematics.

He grew up in a 1960s self-build project in Lincolnshire, recently listed Grade II (2023).

Stafford was a founding trustee of the Higher Education Design Quality Forum (HEDQF) and previously sat on design review panels for CABE, Islington, and Design: South East.

Nicole Crockett

Nicole Crockett PhD is an engagement specialist with an established track record of partnership working, project management and stakeholder involvement. She works as a consultant across the private, public and voluntary sectors to support the delivery of complex user focused projects and programmes. She strives to engage wide ranging stakeholder groups, including those that are harder to reach in change initiatives, working in collaboration with heritage and regeneration professionals and design teams. Through her work she aims to ensure that local people inform the development of masterplans and regeneration projects and that social and economic priorities are delivered. She has a particular interest in Historic England’s High Street Heritage Action Zones Programme.

Nicole was director of the Building Exploratory for many years and before that assistant director at the Architecture Foundation. She has a PhD in Social History from Edinburgh University and was made an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA for services to architecture in 2011.

Dr Elizabeth Darling

Elizabeth Darling PhD is an architectural historian. After a long career in higher education, she is now an independent scholar, writer and curator. Her research focuses on 20th-century British architectural history with a particular interest in inter-war modernist culture, social housing, and gender. She has published on the nature of authorship in the design process; the innovative practices of the inter-war voluntary housing sector; the housing consultant Elizabeth Denby; the relationship between citizenship and the reform of domestic space in inter-war Britain; and women and urban philanthropy in Edwardian Edinburgh.

Her books include a revisionist study of British architectural modernism, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction, (Routledge, 2007), Wells Coates (C20 Society with English Heritage & RIBA Publishing, 2012), AA Women in Architecture 1917-2017 (AA Publishing, 2017) and Suffragette City (Routledge, 2020). She is writing a study of the material and spatial cultures of broadcasting in inter-war England.

Ben Derbyshire

Ben is Chair of HTA Design LLP, a leading multidisciplinary design practice specialising in housing and placemaking where his role also includes directing the practice’s internal design review processes.

He is a Commissioner of Historic England, Chair of the Historic Places Panel, and a member of the High Streets HAZ Strategic Programme Board.

Ben is President of the London Forum of Amenity and Civic Societies and is a current member of the NHBC Council.

He was President of RIBA from 2017 to 2019 where he oversaw fundamental change in the financing and governance of the institute and the instigation of policies in relation to climate action, professional competence and codes of conduct.

Professor Mark Gardiner

Mark Gardiner is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Lincoln. He previously worked at Queen’s University Belfast where he was joint head of Archaeology-Palaeoecology, and before that was deputy director of Archaeology South-East at University College London.

He has been President of the Society for Medieval Archaeology and of the Medieval Settlement Research Group. He was Vice-President of Ruralia – the body for medieval and later rural archaeology in Europe – and has served as Vice-President of the Royal Archaeological Institute.

Mark has a long-standing research interest in both excavated and standing buildings. He has directed excavations in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Norway, and has studied standing structures in Britain and Greenland.

Jon Grantham

Jon Grantham is Managing Director of LUC, with responsibility for the overall performance of the company, and a Director of the Board of Trustees. LUC is the current Employee-Owned Business of the Year. He is a Chartered Town Planner with over 40 years’ experience. His first job was as a Planning Assistant with Forest Heath District Council in Suffolk. He moved to London in 1985 to take up a post in the Regional Planning Division of the Department of the Environment and joined LUC in late 1985.

He has secured planning consent for many major projects and managed the preparation of EIAs for a variety of development projects. He has particular expertise in education, sport, heritage, infrastructure, energy, and water, gained on behalf of a wide range of clients. He has served terms of office on the RTPI Partnership Boards for Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Westminster (current Vice Chair) and Oxford Brookes University, the latter as Vice-Chair. He is a past Chair of Planning Aid for London.

In his spare time, Jon walks, runs, skis and watches live sport and bands. He is a Vice-President of Brentham Cricket Club in Ealing.

Matthew Lloyd

Matthew Lloyd founded Matthew Lloyd Architects in the mid-1990s and remains actively involved in much of the work his Shoreditch-based practice undertakes. As a fourth-generation architect, the design of buildings sits deeply within his DNA, along with a passion for our historic fabric and places.

Over the years, his practice has won acclaim and awards for sensitive, innovative architecture in complex settings, often within historic and institutional contexts. His outspoken design for St. Mary of Eton church in Hackney Wick received an RIBA National Award in 2015, and his practice’s acclaimed Bourne Estate CIP scheme for Camden Council was Overall Winner of the Housing Design Awards in 2018.

Matthew has acted widely as an architectural critic and comment writer. He currently sits on Design Review Panels for the London boroughs of Barnet, Greenwich, Kensington & Chelsea and Islington. He has chaired juries for the RIBA Awards (2026 and 2017), the Hackney Design Awards and the Camden Design Awards.

Professor Peter Mandler

Peter Mandler is Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College. He is a past president of both the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He currently serves on the Councils of the Historical Association and the British Academy.

He is an historian of modern Britain with particular interests in national identity, heritage, education, the humanities and the social sciences (including in the wider English-speaking world) and in the place of history in culture and the media.

His books include The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997), History and National Life (2002) and, edited with Astrid Swenson, From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire, c. 1800-1940 (2013) and, edited with Simon Gunn and Otto Saumarez Smith, The Modern British City, 1945-2000 (2025).

In 2026 he will give the James Ford Lectures in British History at the University of Oxford (on the language of social science in everyday life) and the Neale Lecture at University College London (on the study of history at British universities).

Richard Pollard

Richard Pollard is an architectural historian and historic environment advisor. As a Director in the conservation team at Alan Baxter he advises public and private sector clients across the country. Recent projects include an award-winning Neighbourhood Plan for York Minster and its precinct, multiple station masterplans with Network Rail, the restoration of Crystal Palace Park, advice to Pallant House Gallery and other cultural institutions, and conservation management plans for the National Trust, the York Museums Trust, and Liverpool Cathedral.

In previous incarnations Richard was a researcher and author for Pevsner Architectural Guides, working on three volumes in the north, and before that the Secretary of SAVE Britain’s Heritage. He is vice chair of the Spitalfields Trust and a member of the SAVE casework committee.

Stephen Schwendel Smith

Stephen is a Partner at Wright & Wright Architects, bringing a passion for working with existing buildings and new-build projects in sensitive settings. Stephen’s area of expertise and research interests are sustainable design, supporting empowerment for community projects, and placemaking. An understanding of context in the broadest sense, underpins this approach, from understanding the values, community and physical fabric of a place.

These interests are evident in recent projects that include Magdalen College Library, Oxford, the British Academy, the Enterprise Hub for Royal Academy of Engineering, Lambeth Palace Library and Pallant House Gallery.

Stephen taught a Design Studio at the University of Cambridge for five years, based on public buildings. He was a partner to the Empowering Design Practices research project with the Open University that explores our understanding of, and the transformation of, Places of Worship.

Dr Neal Shasore

Dr Neal Shasore Hon FRIBA is an architectural historian and heritage advocate. His research and writing have focussed primarily on twentieth-century architecture in Imperial Britain, particularly the interwar decades. His book, 'Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London' was shortlisted for the SAHGB’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion in 2023.

Until 2025 he was the Head of School and Chief Executive of the London School of Architecture. He is currently a trustee of the Architectural Heritage Fund, and is a former trustee of the Twentieth Century Society and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

Professor Tarek Teba

Dr Tarek Teba is an Associate Professor in Architectural Heritage at the School of Architecture, Art and Design, University of Portsmouth and the Chair for ICOMOS UK Digital Technology National Committee. Tarek is the Course leader of MA Architecture: Building and Heritage Conservation and the co-chair of the University of Portsmouth Heritage Research Hub.

Tarek’s experience in heritage valuation, sustainable development and adaptive reuse has been developing through practice and research activities, establishing national and international networks and activities around the conservation of architectural and cultural heritage, and community engagement. His contribution to the field is demonstrated in linking theories to practice to develop sustainable regeneration solutions for the heritage context, as well as in bringing together academics and professionals to promote conservation and regeneration debates.

Tarek’s research concerns the conservation of tangible and intangible heritage through creating the balance between contemporary values via community engagement and historic, aesthetic and cultural values. Tarek explores methodological approaches to preserve the cultural and contemporary social values embedded in heritage assets and cities, informing regeneration and adaptive reuse strategies. He uses community engagement and cultural mapping as an informing tool, and virtual modelling and digital heritage approaches as a vehicle to deliver adaptation and development strategies.

Marc Timlin

Marc started his career in local government and has worked for a range of surveying and town planning consultancies in the private sector. Marc is a Chartered Town Planner and heritage professional with 19 years experience of planning and heritage matters in both the public and private sectors. He is currently Director and Head of Heritage, Townscape, and Landscape Services at Turley Planning Consultants, leading a team that provides advice to public and private sector clients across the UK.

He has secured consent for many major and high profile projects, with particular expertise in residential development, complex town centre schemes, education and health care within a range of sensitive heritage contexts.

Marc is a full member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and Institute for Historic Building Conservation and compiles the RICS online guidance on heritage conservation.

Alasdair Travers

Alasdair studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. In his current role as Partner and Head of Design at Purcell, his focus is on designing buildings that enhance our historic places and serve the community and the environment.

Alasdair has particular expertise in masterplanning historic places and designing complex building programmes in sensitive environments. His architectural experience ranges from major museums and galleries to residential masterplans, universities, and national public institutions.

Recent projects include masterplans for Burghley House, Ely Cathedral, and Bab al Azab, the historic citadel in Cairo, as well as architectural projects with the National Gallery, St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and the Temple Church.

Zac Tudor

For the past 22 years Zac has worked for Sheffield City Council's Regeneration Design Team. Here he has had responsibility for city-wide design and coordination of public realm delivery within the placemaking agenda. His focus has been landscape design, spatial master planning, and place-making, helping to maximise the city’s resilience to flooding and climate change, while encouraging new economic regeneration that reflects Sheffield’s distinctive historic character.

He has established himself as the key influence in developing Sheffield's identity as a city of distinctive high-quality public realm promoting its uncompromising sense of place and character. His use of horticulture, local natural materials, craftsmanship and art helps to draw on local heritage to create something that is identifiably Sheffield.

Today his interests turn to the re-purposing and changing perceptions of city as a place, identifying character and maintaining and emphasising the historic value, which when combined start to create new incentives to live, work and visit our urban centres.

Cordula Zeidler

Cordula Zeidler is a Practice Director at conservation firm Donald Insall Associates and leads their London Heritage Consultancy team. She has twenty years of experience as a heritage and design advisor, and has led heritage and townscape strategy, design development and planning negotiations for many complex sites in London and nationally. Among her clients are London’s Great Estates, private developers, and charitable and cultural organisations.

Cordula is a Chair of the London Borough of Islington’s Design Review Panel, and she sits on the Design Review Panel for the London Borough of Lambeth. She was educated at the Bartlett School, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Berlin’s Humboldt University and has a special interest in the architecture of the twentieth century.

Cordula has been a member of the IHBC for most of her career and was previously a project director for Publica, a conservation officer at Islington Council and an advisor for the Twentieth Century Society. Cordula has lectured at Cambridge, Harvard, and the Bartlett School, and written on new architecture and building conservation for a range of British and European publications.

Index of Agenda Items

If you would like to obtain copies of any meeting papers, please email us at governance@historicengland.org.uk.

Declarations of Interest

Registers of Interest are maintained for the Commission, the Historic England Advisory Committee, and the Historic England Executive Team. They record any significant, ongoing interest a member may have and are reviewed by the Audit and Risk Assurance Committee twice yearly.

If a member has an interest in a specific case to be discussed at a meeting, this should be declared at the start of the meeting and recorded in the minutes.