How did you get into architecture? Like a lot of LGBTQ+ children, I became utterly occupied by the business of working out who I was as a person during my years at school – simultaneously trying to fly under the radar and stick my head about the parapet – but it wasn’t easy in the Thatcher years, and Clause 28 did little to help.

As a result, I basically flunked my exams and made the careers teacher laugh when I said I wanted to be an architect. I managed to get a job as an office assistant in a local architectural practice, and they helped me get a portfolio together, which got me into a school of architecture. It hasn’t always been plain sailing since but I got there in the end.

What does it mean to be an LGBTQ+ led practice? I feel a strong responsibility to advocate for those underrepresented in our profession, both within the practice and outside it. We need to make architecture a truly inclusive profession, and I try to make sure that my daily practice enables and encourages younger LGBTQ+ professionals to be themselves.

How has being a member of the LGBTQ+ community shaped your career and your work? I strongly believe that I feel part of a wider community than just the architectural community. I see the two places I spend the most time – the architectural community and the LGBTQ+ community – as entirely enmeshed and yet sometimes at odds. I still struggle to make sense of this at times, but my work is the ultimate expression of this and it has to represent both starting points.

What’s the most influential LGBTQ+ space or building for you? When I first moved to London in the mid-nineties, I was so struck by how LGBTQ+ space seemed to have been constructed that I based an entire term of my Part 2 around it.

The world has changed now and we have moved into a more diverse and data/tech-driven environment where physical queer space has a different meaning but the need for safe and inclusive LGBTQ+ spaces has not lessened.

I still get tingles when I go to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern because it has been a safe queer space since the Second World War and remains so today.

Source:Ewan Munro / Flickr

What advice would you give to your younger self? I was pretty out there as a young gay architecture student, but I would probably have liked to know that the battles I was having back then are still the same battles I fight now.

Do you think it’s easier to be ‘out’ today than when you started? It’s become easier but it’s still not easy. Architectural practice remains old-fashioned and heteronormative in many ways and is still embedded within an antiquated construction industry.  The fight is far from over.

‘I still get tingles when I go to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern’

What would you want to see change in the industry? A more integrated approach to learning and practising.  From the off, we need to help develop and nourish professionals who can be both people and designers.

Perhaps more urgently, we need to evolve faster within the world we practice in terms of tech and the definition of our role, otherwise we will become irrelevant and/or extinct.

Where’s your happy place? In the words of our queen, ‘only when I’m dancing can I feel this free’. See you on the dancefloor.

Tell us your favourite anthem, LGBTQ+ book or film I get goosebumps when I hear ‘Smalltown Boy’, but Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ will always be my queer hymn.