51.5074° N0.1278° W

00 — The Thesis

Making questions answerable...

Fragmented evidence, institutional records that disagree, boundaries that needed to be settled. The route to an answer had to be built first — from borough to international market.

How the projects map to the areas of work:

  • 01Evidence systems

  • 02Applied investigations and strategy

  • 03Research instruments

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Project 01LOCAL

What do public records show about funding linked to Barking?

01 — The question

Published award records and charity accounts describe different parts of B&D’s charitable economy. Read together, they show how much money reaches the borough, which published funders it arrives from, and how the income organisations report is distributed across them.

02 — Follow the money

Charity Commission records and published GrantNav awards are read together to reconstruct which organisations are active in B&D, what their accounts report, and how money moves between them. Each observed funding connection is followed by one step, separating what arrives from funders outside the group from what circulates within it.

03 — Limited circulation

Across the observed history, 1997–2026, the records cover £91.2m of inbound funding from published funders. Only £263k circulates between the organisations themselves, all of it from the single organisation observed distributing awards. From 2021 to 2024, the top tenth of reporting organisations account for 85–88% of reported annual income.

FIG. 01

Observed funding flows

Project 02GLOBAL

What impact have these workshops had on academics’ careers?

01 — The question

These workshops were intended to strengthen international academic ties and engagement. The motivating question is how participation impacted academic careers. To answer this, participants were traced through a number of academic registers.

02 — The cohort

The programme record was linked with ORCID, OpenAlex and Crossref to resolve scholarly identities: a roster of 634 participants across 187 workshops, spanning 60 countries and territories. Publication activity was then compared across the three years before and after each person’s first participation, with co-authorship examined only where both workshop peers have accepted OpenAlex identities.

03 — The trajectory

Among the 44 participants with complete seven-year observation windows, publication trajectories varied widely and raw output fell on average. After adjustment the average estimate sat close to zero but remained imprecise, so no common workshop-timed shift was detected. Of 1,138 workshop-peer pairs, 18 had accepted OpenAlex identities for both people, and two first appeared as co-authors after the workshop.

FIG. 02

The programme collaboration network

Project 03URBAN

Is access to culture equitable?

No single register describes the organisations through which London’s cultural life is produced, and access to what they offer is uneven. Codex identifies and maps them, making London’s cultural infrastructure legible and able to be investigated.

Strata asks about the structural patterns in how these cultural institutions are distributed. Where are they more likely to appear, and why? Through this, Strata begins to uncover some of the spatial patterns that underlie London’s culture.

> codex map_

03A

Strata · choice network

03B
Project 04GLOBAL

Can an expansion strategy be justified rather than intuited?

01 — The brief

The global art market concentrates almost three quarters of its sales in three national markets — the UK, the US and China. For a consultancy already operating in one of them, expansion is not a question of ambition but of address: which markets, entered where, justified by what?

02 — The pipeline

Three geographies, three postures, three instruments. Planning data turns the UK’s development pipeline into a lead engine; a census-driven index funnel narrows fifty US states to five entry cities; a gateway thesis routes the China strand through two culturally-mediating localities, their identities withheld. The strands converge in an autonomous competitor sweep — twenty-four agentic analyses across eight cities and three segments.

03 — The shortlist

Eight cities, a register of roughly two hundred competitors, and a strategy the client can re-run as the data changes. The recommendations themselves were bought and stay withheld — what is published is the architecture that produced them, redactions included.

FIG. 04

Fifty states to five entry cities

Project 05NATIONAL

What environmental traces become visible when political power changes?

01 — The question

A council changes hands; a commitment is declared; something is or is not commissioned and built; and only then might an environmental signal move — while organised public action runs alongside, sometimes ahead of the politics, sometimes behind. No one system tests that chain, so a research framework of five is being assembled.

02 — Five systems

This observatory is being assembled one system at a time: the electoral record, policy and procurement registers, ecological observation and climate services, and the record of organised public action. Each has to be obtained, made internally consistent, and placed on a shared timeline and a shared map before relationships between them can be tested.

03 — What registers

None yet, the instrument is still being calibrated: some sources have returned structured samples, others have confirmed routes awaiting acquisition, and the geographies do not yet align. Findings appear here only when a versioned analytical release has tested a relationship.

FIG. 05

Five systems — every link untested

Methodological demonstrations, not a catalogue of commissions.

Some are self-directed, and some remain in active development. Each shows how the work is constructed and where its evidence stops.