I’ve been involved with museums and heritage throughout my career. For the past good many years I’ve been a Museums and Heritage Consultant, based in the UK. Projects have been hugely varied: feasibility studies for new museum services, reviews of existing ones, proposals for developing audiences and analyses of collections, training courses, and work in museums, historic sites and buildings and ‘intangible heritage.’ Nowadays - thanks to the blessing of a pension - I can choose my projects (like a 2012 training course for Sudanese museum staff - above left) and spend more time on writing and editing. It also lets me once again do real museum work - as a regular volunteer at Chichester’s Novium museum - and learn to keep bees.

My earlier career took me from small local museums to Director of the UK’s largest Area Museum Council - where we struggled to support 700 member museums. One exciting project over recent years has been helping to set up a new museum in Aksum, Ethiopia - so I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of  being involved with new museums at two towns of huge significance to me: Aksum and Oxford.

A third edition of the textbook Museum Basics appeared last March - with an accompanying website

My specialist subject is the material culture of religion, in which I helped to found and help to edit what is now the principal journal: Material Religion, the Journal of Objects Art and Belief. My book on religious objects in museums has just been published - see publications. A flyer for a 20% discount is here. And Steph Burns of the British Museum and I have started a blog on Religion in Museums - please post!

Other current projects include editing, with Martin Henig, a volume of essays in memory of our late colleague John Rhodes, editing the diary for 1863 of a Victorian carpenter in London, and authoring, with Robin Clutterbuck, a handbook for teachers on school museums (if we can find a publisher...)