Clarity
on heritage glazing.

I've spent the best part of twenty years offering clarity on buildings that most people don't know where to start with — not because they're complicated in the abstract, but because the solutions that work for modern construction simply don't apply to them, and finding what does takes experience that's genuinely hard to come by.

My background is in the supply and installation of slimline insulated glazing in historic buildings. I was one of the earliest practitioners in the UK, working with the technology from its first commercial applications. Over time that led to increasingly complex projects: listed buildings where standard approaches had been refused, Grade I applications where nobody had previously found a solution, buildings so significant that getting it wrong wasn't an option.

The National Portrait Gallery asked me to resolve a problem that a nationally recognised specialist couldn't. Haworth Tompkins brought me in as consultant on Trellick Tower. Gilbert Ash came back to me for the Royal Albert Dock. These projects happened because the people commissioning them knew that what I do isn't standard practice — it comes from working from first principles on buildings that demand it.

I now work independently as a heritage glazing consultant, producing technical papers, expert reports and specification guidance for conservation architects, heritage bodies and local authorities. I'm also happy to be involved at any stage — from initial viability through to reviewing contractors and overseeing installation — wherever the glazing is complex enough to need someone who has actually done it.

Most of the buildings I've worked on have stories that go far beyond the glazing. I've worked in a room in Sandwich where Elizabeth I reputedly stayed the night, the original painted cartoons and scrolled ink columns still on the wall. I've been into spaces in Trellick Tower that almost nobody visits, and heard from the architect about the lives lived there across fifty years — the mattress fires, the overcrowding, the slow reclamation of a building that had become something its designer never intended. The Royal Albert Dock was built to plans its designer had burned on his deathbed, for fear of what might happen if they fell into the wrong hands. These stories matter to me — not as curiosities, but because understanding what a building is and has been is part of understanding what it needs.