Jim is a historian of modern Britain who specialises in urban, economic and cultural histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work has focused particularly on patterns of urban governance and renewal since the beginning of the nineteenth century as well as on how people experience, remake and make account of their world.

From 2021-2024 he was the PI on the AHRC leadership project ‘The Half Life of the Blitz’, whilst from 2015-2019 he worked on the oral history component of the Lottery-funded International Bomber Command Centre’s digital archive project, which now hosts over 1000 interviews with both bomber crews and civilian survivors. He is currently working with Hull art group Three Ways East on the history of drag project ‘Scene But Not Heard’, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Historic England, and Humber Museums.  

He has published books on urban renewal, governance and everyday life in mid-twentieth-century British cities either side of the Second World War (Reconstructing Modernity, 2018) and on the history of outdoor advertising control since the early-nineteenth century (Injurious Vistas, 2021), which were funded by an RHS Scouloudi Award and the Economic History Society respectively. He is currently completing a monograph titled ‘Tales from the Broken City’ that examines children’s writing on bombing using materials drawn from the 1942 British Bombing Survey. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Manchester, where he also taught before moving to the University of Lincoln in the summer of 2014.