About the Project
This Collaborative Doctoral Award is part of an AHRC NWCDTP funded team project, titled ‘Waterborne: The heritage, culture and environment of UK reservoirs’, a collaboration between the Universities of Liverpool, Lancaster and Manchester Metropolitan. Using traditional means alongside critical creative methods, the team project will research the design, literary history and heritage of reservoir building in the UK. Three distinct, but interlinked projects will create a rich understanding of the interrelations between design, policy, community memory and the tangible and intangible heritage of water infrastructure. This new understanding will assist in the creation of more sustainable futures and situate the viewpoints of a variety of communities and groups at the centre of a national conversation.
The project at Lancaster University is in partnership with Historic England. They have recently identified an absence of an assessment framework for reservoirs as a ‘monument type’. Reservoirs are one of the last missing pieces in the industrial archaeology of the UK. This project will address a significant gap in knowledge at a moment when reservoirs, their associated built objects and their landscapes are subject to changes in regulation that will lead to physical change. Such change necessitates better understanding of the historical significance of reservoirs, their structures and their landscapes to address the contexts of regulation and historic designation.
This novel contribution will consider the combined role of heritage and environment in infrastructural settings, bringing history and ecology into a relational discourse. The project will have a sequence of overlapping, but distinct, phases, designed with the CDA partner, that will address both the gap in knowledge and to inform future methods of heritage assessment.
Funding Notes
Duration – 3.5 year studentship with fees fully paid.
Stipend – approximately £19,500 for academic year 24-25 and increasing each year.
