I now spend quite a lot of time in advisory work. I really believe very deeply in the importance of the waterways. For me personally they represented a real life-line - a home, a community, and a place to express my labour. I also believe deeply in the social importance of a connection to a shared history. It's an idea that undergirds a lot of my work at Theatreship and Artship.

I currently sit on the Council of Experts for National Historic Ships UK, and the London and South East Advisory Board for the Canal and River Trust - I find these both really helpful forums to engage with.

Recent/current projects: I recently worked on restructuring the National Historic Ships register. Historically the online register was absolutely excellent as a database structure for human users - information was well-structured and easy to drill down to by clicking through filters. This meant though that much of the data was 'hidden' behind clicks. The way in which people engage with information on the internet is changing. The invisibility of this data to LLMs meant that queries about historic ships were being met with hallucinated responses. NHS-UK is the custodian of the registers. They hold this really significant repository of data on the historic ships in the UK. I worked in a voluntary capacity to aggregate the database, and reformat it into a separate directory structure, formatted in schema markup to make it maximally available to machine readers.

I'm also currently exploring setting up an All-Party Parliamentary Group for mobile heritage (planes, trains & automobiles... &, importantly to me, ships!). Built heritage has significant statutory protection in the UK, but it was a recent discovery for me that floating vessels have almost none. In fact a ship only receives statutory protection in the planning process when it sinks! It's then listed as a designated wreck. It's a perverse incentive that operating vessels are more at risk than submerged ones.

I'd like to work on setting up an APPG, informed by cross-sector partners and collaborators, to go about finding sensible ways to fill this regulatory gap. Britain's industrial heritage is a hugely significant part of our cultural story - and we're losing many of the examples of that heritage at an alarming rate. I'd like to see processes put in place to help stem that tide - somewhere between the protections provided for listed buildings, and the protections provided for pieces of nationally significant artwork.

If you'd like to get involved or support with setting this up please do get in touch!