Welcome
A life’s work grounded in people, landscapes and the stories that connect them
Welcome to my site.
First off, two questions…
- Do you want to contribute to the resilience of communities and localities through your community or professional activities?
- Do you want to contribute to the resilience of communities and localities through your walking, cycling and paddling activities?
If you answered yes to either (or both), you’re in the right place. My site is a gateway to learning, sharing experiences and collaborating with others who, like us, have a focus on supporting community-focused sustainable futures through our actions.
My Work: People, Place, Possibility and Transformation
At the heart of everything I do is facilitating or supporting community resilience – the social, cultural, ecological and relational strength that emerges when people work together to shape their own futures. Through Conversations with Communities (CwC), I support communities build this resilience by strengthening identity, supporting inclusive decision-making, confronting inequity and weaving together lived experience with practical, grounded strategies for making change happen. My professional practice, with deep foundations in the linking of theory and practice, frames this.
Equally central to my practice is LoST Travel – Landscapes of Stories and Time. LoST is an approach to travel that invites us to engage with landscapes and communities deeply. LoST travellers recognise that every place has layers of history, culture, ecology and meaning – and that travel is not simply movement through but a relationship with. My work at the intersection of travel and community resilience is shaped by this philosophy.
Together, these two threads – community resilience and LoST Travel – create the foundation for my professional life. They inform my teaching, inspire my writing, shape my photography and guide the communities and spaces I build.
The Four Streams of My Work
To bring this experience to others, I work across four interconnected streams: Build, Write, Educate, and Create. Each stream has its own identity, but all are woven together by my commitment to people, place and resilience.
BUILD: Hubs, Networks, Communities
The Build stream has a rationale that’s important to me – it’s the place where we can come together and explore possibilities, creative approaches to building resilient communities and landscapes and have this ripple out beyond just our own interactions. I call these ‘networks of networks’ where connections between ourselves ripple out to your own connections, shaped by our ideas and practices (the ‘thinking and doing’). When we’re wanting to build resilient communities and landscapes, what more can we ask for?
This stream includes the LoST Hub, my professional networks, the work I do with communities and my online presence. These are living, evolving spaces where conversations, collaborations and ideas unfold.
The LoST Hub is the anchor: a space for community members, community practitioners and travellers to engage with community resilience. Through networks of practitioners, organisations and travellers, the Hub supports exchanges of knowledge, reflection and practice.
This website itself along with the LoST website, is part of the Build stream. They’re portals into my work – an introduction to my courses, writing projects, photography, partnerships and upcoming developments.
WRITE: Books, Articles and the Narrative Life of Place
Writing is an important creative and professional expression. It’s an important part of how I explore landscapes, how I understand communities and how I share ideas with the wider world.
Alongside books (for example, my recent Trekking in the Indian Himalayas), I write articles, essays and reflective pieces on community resilience, conversations with communities, ecological change and the meaning of place. Writing strengthens all other aspects of my work – it informs courses, enriches photography and anchors the Hub as a space for engagement.
EDUCATE: Courses, Masterclasses and Professional Development
Through the Educate stream, I develop and teach courses and masterclasses that help people engage more deeply with communities and landscapes. These are available through the LST Collaboration Hub.
The Conversations with Communities courses focus on understanding and facilitating community resilience – exploring ethics, equity, participatory approaches, cultural safety and the relational practices that support collective agency.
The Getting LoST course introduces people to the LoST philosophy and practice, while the LoST Traveller Masterclass takes participants deeper into the ethics, cultural dimensions and landscape-based practices of place-specific travel.
I also design and deliver tailored professional development programmes through the LoST Hub for organisations, councils, NGOs and community groups, supporting them to strengthen resilience, collaboration and understanding in how they work.
Education is an important part of how I share what I have learned – and how I help others bring these practices to life in their own communities and landscapes.
CREATE: Photography and Studio Work
The final stream, Create, is where my visual creativity lives. Photography has always been part of my practice – an act of attentiveness to the landscape, of slowing down and of seeing landscapes not as backgrounds but as living archives.
Through my studio, I focus on the printed image – prints, curated photographic series and bespoke cards, calendars and diaries – that reflect the spirit of place, wherever that may be. This complements the writing and the teaching – images become tools for storytelling, reflection and connection.
Creating visual art deepens my connection to landscape and provides another avenue for sharing the depth of place.
A Connected Practice
These four streams are not separate – they form an integrated practice centred on people, landscapes, creativity and story. Everything I do is about building stronger relationships: between individuals, within communities and between people and the landscapes they inhabit or move in.
This website is an invitation to explore that practice some more – to read, learn, reflect and connect.
Have a look around my site and get in touch. You can get in touch/stay in touch a few different ways. You can join the LST Collaboration Hub via the ‘LST Collaboration’ page. Or you can follow me on insta, where I use #LSTpeopleandplace, #LSTconversationswithcommunities and #LSTcommunitiesandresilience for posts specifically focused on communities and landscapes.
It’d be great to start some conversations.
