About
I ask too many questions and I enjoy writing, so journalism suits me perfectly. Former Times associate editor and Telegraph assistant editor Brian MacArthur described my work rather more eloquently as "good quality reporting and a passion for crusading journalism".
After a postgraduate journalism course where I won an award for my writing and interviewing, I was a news reporter and then news editor on a series of London weekly newspapers. My investigative reports on the capital’s biggest and most dilapidated hostel for asylum seekers sparked an interest in social affairs and won me the runner-up prize in the Commission for Racial Equality's annual media awards.
I was a freelance news reporter for the Times, the Express and the Evening Standard before joining the staff of the Evening Standard as a reporter before becoming its Local Government Correspondent. I broke stories including those on asylum and squatters' rights and my campaigning series on London's key workers was published well before the issue hit the political mainstream.
Leaving news for features, I wrote on women’s social issues for magazines such as Marie Claire, She, Cosmopolitan and Real. I wrote for The Guardian, for which I produced a major supplement on key worker housing, and Time Out, for which I wrote a series investigating Ken Livingstone's record in his first term as London Mayor. I was the deputy editor of a specialist housing magazine at a time when housing and regeneration issues had shot up the political agenda. I’ve written for specialist titles such as the Local Government Chronicle and Building, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's quarterly journal, Search, and for publications issued by the Home Office and Department for Communities and Local Government.
More recently, I’ve worked as a commissioning editor for The Guardian, written extensively for its Society pages, edited housing policy reports for the charity Shelter, contributed to the first major progress report on the government’s antisocial behaviour unit and undertaken research and report-writing work for the local government Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA).