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Staff Profile

Dr Sally Watson

ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow

  • Email: sally.watson@ncl.ac.uk
  • Address: School of Architecture Planning and Landscape
    Henry Daysh Building
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

I am an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in urban planning and architecture. My research focuses on the relationship between ideas about children and the design and regulation of the built environment in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically, I am interested in how urban environment professionals in postwar Britain navigated and translated into practice different types of knowledge about children, including social research, professional practice-based knowledge and lay knowledge, and how these were shaped by the politics of age, gender, class and race. I am particularly interested in how housing and public space has been designed to support or to deter children's play and mobility in the context of postwar citizen activism, housing politics and planning for the motor car.


My PhD, titled 'Housing Landscapes and the Politics of Play: From Parker Morris to Byker, c.1955-c.1995', examined the shifting relationship between ideas about children and their play and postwar housing layouts. My current ESRC Fellowship will build on this through researching the design and regulation of public space in 1980s and 1990s social housing in Newcastle.


Prior to starting my PhD, I worked in museums and architectural archives in Edinburgh, London and Newcastle.

Publications