48 C O N T E X T 1 4 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 7 Vox pop Rob Lloyd-Sweet Who has been your greatest inspiration? Other than my parents? My Welsh grandfather. He was the son of a collier but worked hard at school and raised the money to go to university by playing violin in a local cinema in the silent movie days. He became a headmaster, captain in the army (during the second world war), captain of his local cricket team and first violin in the local orchestra, and he grew great raspberries. As a child it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do. He was my first teacher and fed my love of archaeology. Born in 1911, he was a living connection with Wales in the industrial revolution. He got me membership of the Jorvik Viking Centre’s ‘Toki’ club for my sixth birthday and I was hooked from there on. I added the Lloyd to my surname because of him and still support Wales when it comes to Rugby. What has been your best idea? I don’t claim to have had any great ideas. I try to spot good things other people have done and apply them to new problems. Using the art style of old railway advertising posters to analyse the famous ‘dreaming spires’ views of Oxford was a bit like that. What would you like to have been if you had not become a conservationist? My career has been very meandering. I wanted to be a field archaeologist, but when I left university the jobs were not in the right places or did not pay enough. Early in my career I worked in history of medicine studying the AIDs pandemic and malaria in subSaharan Africa (among other things), and considered going into medicine or epidemiology. That also nearly led into flood engineering and anthropology. I was interested in the adaptations of people living in inland deltas in central Africa. Semi-regular changes in water courses (partly due to sunspot activity) caused a 30-year cycle of movement of settlements, agriculture and fishing that could be studied over a century through oral history, and colonial-period mapping and aerial photography. I started an MSc to follow that course, but when the hydrology and hydrogeology elements were cancelled I chose planningfocused options instead. I got a job in archaeology and built heritage consultancy that really suited me. How do you reply when at a party someone asks what you do? I am an archaeologist and a planner. I help councils and communities decide what to do with the special buildings and historic places in their cities, towns and villages by understanding them and planning for their future. What is the biggest frustration in your job? Working indoors, being desk-bound. I am an outdoors person, and want to get out and meet people and see the historic places I am discussing, rather than writing letters. And being dyslexic (it’s a curse in a world of passwords and telephone numbers). And people actually planting buddleia. Stop it! It’s dreadful for historic buildings and there are plenty of other plants that will feed the butterflies. What would you like to be doing in five years’ time? Historic England is a great place to be at the moment. I am in a very supportive team with the opportunity to work with lots of people and to make a difference, particularly through our work with neighbourhood planning forums. I would like to move around the organisation a bit to experience the work of other departments. After that I don’t know, but I like to work at the meeting point of research and decision-making. My experience in the past decade has been that career plans are often the first casualty of events, while what makes a job good is as much the people you are working with as what you are doing. Your favourite place? Dudley (the whole borough, including the other towns). It has it all in a neat package: prehistoric, Roman,
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