My work stands at the intersection of cultural history and cultural studies, particularly focused on urban culture and urban governance. I have written about the history of architecture, urban improvement, and particularly the history of crime, policing and the rule of law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am currently extending this research into the fields of morality, civility and security, exploring the configuration of diverese threats to the eighteenth-century body politic and the mechanisms devised to address them. This work explores the promotion and use of devices -  discursive and material -  to shape the behaviour of eighteenth-century Londoners. The first part of this research concentrates on the ways in which arguments for government and self-government produced particular configurations of the body politic, forming an important part of the history of both the state and the social. Central to this work is an analysis of the various ways in which moral entrepreneurs and urban reformers gave their ideas motive force by linking their projects to different accounts of social change, both positive and negative, according to different temporal logics. This involved generating an affective relation to practices for civilizing and securing urban space and providing a sense of identification and agency for the actor.

More recently I have also written about religious cultures in London since the late nineteenth century and am currently involved in a collaborative research on gender and religion in contemporary London. This collaborative research on contemporary urban culture is now extending into an exploration of the relationship between culture, objects and infrastructure, particularly focused around the use of urban space.