London Advisory Committee

Membership

Nairita Chakraborty - Chair

Anna Bond
Patricia Brown
Nick Collins
Nicole Crockett
Elizabeth Darling
Ben Derbyshire
Jon Grantham
Tanvir Hasan
Matthew Lloyd
Richard Pollard
Neal Shasore
Marc Timlin
Richard Upton
Sadie Watson

Biographies

Nairita Chakraborty - Chair

Nairita has over 16 years of experience in heritage, townscape and design. She has experience in ensuring sustained use of historic buildings whilst delivering large scale regeneration, housing and infrastructure projects. She has produced significant work on the adaptation and conversion of large and complex listed buildings, as well as town centre, public realm, and conservation area schemes.

She has recently set up her own practice Revive and Tailor which focuses on integrating existing buildings within regeneration proposals innovatively and resourcefully. Nairita is a member of Historic England's Advisory Committee alongside Havering and Kensington and Chelsea’s Design Review Panels. She is a full member of the Royal Town Planners Institute and the Institute of Historic Building Conservation and is a Historic England Commissioner.

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.

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.

Elizabeth Darling

Elizabeth Darling PhD is Reader in Architectural History at Oxford Brookes University and lectures in the art and architectural history of the modern period. 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) and AA Women in Architecture 1917-2017 (AA Publishing, 2017). 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.

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.

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.

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.

Richard Upton

Richard Upton is the Founder and Chief Executive of Cathedral Group Plc – a mixed use property development company based in an 18th Century chapel at London Bridge.  In May 2014, Cathedral was acquired by Development Securities PLC, and Richard joined its main board. 

Richard has led Cathedral since its creation in 1998 as a part of Mount Anvil Plc a house builder he also founded. Richard has 25 years experience of mixed use development, involving many historic buildings and has lectured widely on the optimum use of public property for socio-economic growth.
 
Richard has been a Governor of Leisure Link, a not for profit provider of leisure services in the London Borough of Bexley, a Governor of Rose Bruford Drama College (where he held the position of Chair of Estates), a member of the Eltham Regeneration Board and currently sits on Historic England’s London Advisory Committee.

Sadie Watson

Sadie Watson PhD is an urban archaeologist at MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), with over 20 years experience directing complex multi-phase projects, predominantly in the City of London. Major fieldwork projects Sadie has supervised include Paternoster Square, Bloomberg London and Sugar Quay (Old Custom House) on the Thames waterfront.

Completed in 2015, her PhD analysed the contracting archaeological sector with reference to the contribution to knowledge from these major projects, concepts that were further developed during a period spent as Archaeologist in Residence at the MacDonald Institute, University of Cambridge.

Since 2019 Sadie has been undertaking a 4-year UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, aiming at ensuring that development-led archaeology leads to meaningful and relevant research and genuine community participation.

Sadie is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a Member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists.

Index of Agenda Items

If you would like to obtain copies of any meeting papers, please email us at [email protected].

Declarations of Interest

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

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