I am now retired. I undertook my Fellowship in 1987, visiting the USA and Canada. My subject was the role of waterways in urban regeneration.

I qualified as a chartered town planner in 1976. During the 1980s, I was working on a range of waterway-linked economic regeneration projects in Lancashire (Leeds Liverpool Canal) with Lancashire Enterprises Ltd and later in a multidisciplinary development team at Manchester City Council working on the restoration of the Castlefield Canal Basin in the centre of the city.

I used my Fellowship to look at best practice in North America, mostly in the north-eastern states of the USA, including Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee and Lowell, Massachusetts where a combination of state, federal and private finance had been used successfully to bring jobs and wider economic investment to depressed areas using waterway heritage as a draw.

From a career perspective, the knowledge and insight gained helped me develop my management capabilities. I retired from full-time employment in 2006 as Regional Director for the North East, Yorkshire and East Midlands with English Partnerships, the national regeneration agency.