Our People

Dr Sydney Ayers Mercer

Member of Common Room

Tutor in Architecture & Urbanism, The Prince's Foundation

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

Sydney is Tutor in Architecture & Urbanism at The Prince’s Foundation, where she teaches across academic programmes and university partnerships. She also acts as Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Urbanism; and works on special projects related to traditional building and heritage skills training.

As an historian of architecture & design from 1750, Sydney’s research centres on the afterlife and reception of British classical (neo)architecture and design in Britain as well as globally, from the long eighteenth to the present day. With a particular focus on the work of eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam, she writes on the history of buildings and the idea of buildings as monuments representing more about the time in which they were listed than of their original making. Sydney also has a particular interest in urban and design history relating to city expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Prior to joining The Prince’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 in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh in 2020, 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 also holds a BA from Dartmouth College.