Our People

Dr Sydney Ayers Mercer

Member of Common Room

Tutor in Architecture & Urbanism, The King's Foundation

PhD, MScR (Edinburgh); BA (Dartmouth); AFHEA

Sydney is Tutor in Architecture & Urbanism at The King’s Foundation, and Research Associate in Sustainable Urban Development at Oxford Lifelong Learning.

At The King’s Foundation, Sydney teaches across academic programmes and university partnerships. She also works on special projects related to furniture history, traditional building and crafts, and heritage skills training. Sydney acts as Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Urbanism.

As an historian of architecture and design from 1750, Sydney’s research explores how architecture, design and the built environment shape and are shaped by society, taste and cultural memory over time. One stream of Sydney’s research centres on the afterlife and reception of British (neo)classical architecture and design in Britain as well as globally, from the long eighteenth to the present day—with a particular focus on the work and legacy of architect Robert Adam.

Sydney also works within sustainable architecture and urbanism, looking at how existing and heritage buildings can respond to contemporary challenges related to city building and urban development. Sydney’s research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban design and expansion; ideas of beauty and taste in urban design; and how planned routes through cities reflect and shape city form and urban development, explored initially through Singapore’s F1 and marathon races.

Prior to joining The King’s Foundation, Sydney was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, funded by a PhD Scholarship from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB). Sydney completed an MScR at the University of Edinburgh, and holds a BA from Dartmouth College.