The City of London "Square Mile" is the historic centre of London and the financial and commercial heart of the UK. It is a very high-density urban environment with a low level of greening and few mature trees. Specific modelling carried out by the Met Office (UKCP18) for 'The City' of London indicates that overall winters will be 20% wetter and summers 30% drier with more extreme weather events and sea level rise. Increased rainfall and surface water run-off present an issue for The City, where the presence of hard surfaces and will significantly increase the risk of flooding of high-profile commercial premises. Temperatures and heatwaves will also increase in frequency leading to increased mortality and issues of overheating for The City's people and services. The future resilience of The City to climate change is high on the City of London Corporation's (CoL) agenda. The aim of this embedded researcher placement between Katy Freeborough, of the British Geological Survey, and the CoL is to support the delivery of the City of London Corporation's Climate Action Strategy 2020-2027. A key strand of this strategy is to improve the resilience of the City to future extreme weather and long-term climatic changes though identification of potential adaptation measures. The 12- month placement will focus on the use of subsurface space to support delivery of the Climate Action Strategy to identify potential opportunities as to how subsurface space may be better used to improve climate resilience. The project will evaluate a range of subsurface climate adaptation options; sustainable urban drainage systems, urban greening and tree planting, cool spaces below ground, ground sourced energy and prevention of damage to buried utility services. Traditionally subsurface knowledge has been under-utilised in resilience planning as its significance is often misunderstood or underappreciated. Addressing data issues and interpreting technical analysis can be problematic for non-specialists. The research project has been designed to help identify and better understand data, identify suitable locations for surface-subsurface climate resilience adaption measures and support the development of plans for their implementation and future monitoring of their effectiveness. The placement will provide a platform for surface-subsurface knowledge exchange. The project will identify, collate, examine and understand relevant data and policy sources; explore how best to visualise and represent the 3D information; how to manage data sharing protocols; and provide the level and understanding of data required to fully define options for subsurface use. By working alongside urban planning experts at CoL, Katy will gain greater insight into planning processes and routes to downscale NERC geoscience research for local application delivered through the planning regime. Fundamentally the placement will answer the question 'How can the urban subsurface help us meet our climate objectives?', and specifically for CoL 'What subsurface measures can be implemented and where?' and 'If current understanding is insufficient, what work is needed to fill the gaps?'.

Early Career researcher Dr Simon Grennan, with established scholars Dr Roger Sabin and Dr Julian Waite, will undertake and disseminate new research that will bring to public attention and deliver a rigorous academic context for understanding the re-invention of the English comic strip by Marie Duval in London, between 1869-85. They will produce an international Touring Exhibition, an open-access Online Database, an Academic Publication and 3 Journal Papers, in partnership with The Guildhall Library, Tate Britain and Illustrative Festival, Berlin. The production of 19th century English comics in humour periodicals was an exclusively male activity, with one exception. Marie Duval was a popular stage actress whose husband, Charles Ross, edited Judy, a satirical London periodical. Between 1869-1885, Duval drew over 100 comic strip pages for Judy that radically developed a character created by Ross named Ally Sloper, a work-shy ne'er-do-well Londoner. Duval's access to the publishing business allowed her to pioneer the development of a drawn story-world through regular serialisation, creating new reader expectations of both form and content, so that readers used her strips in a new way. She also acted in popular plays, famously subverting gender expectations in the role of 'leading man'. Duval worked in the genre of melodrama, the dominant theatre practice of the 19th century. Her narrative drawing shows the influence of this practice, in both the form of the strips and the mechanisms for reader comprehension. The Sloper strips utilise depictive techniques that contradict those of a trained illustrator. She had no training, and the visible speed and vigour of facture of Duval's drawings became another comedic device, communicating the exciting, disposable and even daring character of Sloper's world of physical comedy. As a result of the depictive techniques that she employed and the milieu in which they were read, the world that her strips create is unlike any other English drawn narrative in the 19th century. Duval recreated the comics medium in English on the basis of the new ways that readers made use of them. There have been no attempts to study or present Duval's activity as a draughtswoman/female actor in the male environment of periodical publishing, relative to her development of the new comics medium. Neither has there been any study of the techniques, contexts and reception of 19th century melodrama compared to Duval's drawings, nor analysis of the range of impacts upon readers of different narrative drawing styles in humour periodicals in this period of new cross-media fertilisation. Our research method will adopt a mixture of empirical and theoretical approaches to knowledge production, looking beyond empirical data to understand social structures, both recognising and departing from theories about underlying structures, seeking to reveal the historical contingency of previously accepted knowledge and practices. Outputs will comprise a) a new open access Online Database (an image catalogue raisonné) of Duval's Sloper strips hosted by the University of Chester, b) a public Touring Exhibition displayed at Tate Britain and Illustrative Berlin, c) an Academic Publication and d) interim outputs comprising three peer-reviewed Journal Articles in British, French and American journals. Experienced research project leader and established scholar Professor Deborah Wynne will mentor Dr Grennan.

London's dramatic records from the Elizabethan and Stuart periods - the age of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Thomas Dekker, and others - are of unparalleled importance, but have been mostly overlooked by scholarship until now. For too long dismissed as the domain of dour anti-theatrical puritans, a place where playgoing was frowned upon if not explicitly prohibited, the City of London was in fact a hotbed of dramatic activity, and the numerous records that survive of performance within its boundaries are an untapped resource. From the mid sixteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, theatrical activity was taking place within the City of London at the same time as in the famous suburban playhouses such as the Theatre, the Globe, and the Rose. Indeed, on many occasions the very same writers and performers - including dramatists Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, Thomas Heywood, and Anthony Munday, as well as high-profile actors like Richard Burbage of the King's Men and Edward Alleyn of the Admiral's Men - were being employed in both domains, a fact which deserves to be better known. 'Civic London 1559-1642' will produce for the first time a full picture of performances at the overlooked City inns such as the Bel Savage on Ludgate and the Bull on Bishopsgate, where, for example, some of Marlowe's plays, and possibly even some by Shakespeare, were likely staged. It will investigate performances in the City's livery company halls and in its schools (such as the Merchant Taylors' School, attended by Thomas Kyd and Edmund Spencer, amongst others), as well as exploring pageantry and drama on the river Thames and on the City streets. 'Civic London 1558-1642' will therefore be the first project to reveal the depth and richness of the City's performance culture in the Renaissance, enabling academics as well as lay researchers to understand the vibrant theatrical traditions of England's capital city in the hey-day of English drama. The project's research findings will be hosted on a searchable, free-to-use pre-publication website, accompanied by user guides and search aids. The research will thus be accessible by local, national, and international audiences and by non-specialists as well as academics. Non-specialist audiences may initially find the project research interesting based on their knowledge of the most famous dramatist of the day, but through 'Civic London 1559-1642' they will learn that there was a great deal more to Renaissance theatre than simply Shakespeare. The project will foreground the important contributions to the drama of this period made by other writers and performers, some of whom will be less familiar but who in this context were actually rather more important. The project has public engagement built in throughout. The cultural history of London is of perennial appeal, especially since some of the forms of performance captured by the research - such as the Lord Mayor's Show, which still draws large crowds annually - continue to this day, and thus speak directly to the lived experience of many people. Part of the project's public engagement work is to develop a mobile app to provide virtual walking tours to enable people to map and locate the performance venues explored by the research, thus enhancing its accessibility still further. The project team also plan a free public exhibition and study day, and a public lecture, at accessible venues in London. In addition, the research will undoubtedly have a substantial impact on teaching and learning at school, college and HE level. Drama from the time of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and their contemporaries is central to GCSE, A Level and university English curricula, and being able to draw freely on the project outputs from the project's website will enable teachers and students alike to transform their understanding of the theatre of this crucial period.

Permeable (fast draining) infrastructure will reduce the impact from climate change and urbanisation related flooding, which has a projected annual global cost of £500bn by 2030. Flooding is expected to cost the UK economy £27bn annually by 2080, without investment in flood resilient infrastructure. Along with the 2020 government plan for green infrastructure development, it is timely to invest in flood resilient permeable infrastructure. An extreme example of flood-affected infrastructure are airport pavements, impacted by stormwater and ice/snow build-up causing aircraft skidding. Skidding accounts for nearly half of all post 1990 major global commercial air crashes. In 2017 a Heathrow snow event grounded over 50,000 passengers and required a hurried £10m purchase of de-icing equipment. The current methods for preventing ice/snow build-up damage the environment, aircraft components and runway surfaces, increasing infrastructure maintenance costs. Airport operators, seeking to address these concerns, have expressed a strong desire to use permeable concrete technology to keep infrastructure clear. Permeable concrete pavements are one of the most promising mitigation strategies to prevent surface flooding, they rapidly drain stormwater through otherwise impermeable infrastructure. Conventional permeable pavements are, however, prone to clogging, due to debris trapped within the pore network, blocking the pavement and reducing its drainage capacity. The frequent required maintenance degrades performance and service life and is difficult to perform in an active airport. Most importantly, conventional permeable pavements have insufficient strength, making them unsuited for airports. There is an urgent need for a new system that can reliably keep airports clear of standing water and ice/snow. I recently developed next generation clogging resistant permeable pavement (CRP) of uniform pore structure to address infrastructure flooding. It has improved strength (twice as strong >50 MPa) and higher permeability (ten times more) than conventional systems of equal porosity, yet does not clog despite exposure to stormwater sediments. This Fellowship will significantly reengineer my novel pavement to develop the first permeable pavement, with sufficient strength and resilience, for the extreme airport case, while also applicable to less extreme highway, railway and novel green wall scenarios. These step-change advancements will be achieved by steel reinforcement, used in permeable pavements for the first time. The structural performance, material integrity, skid resistance, long-term durability and hydrological (drainage) properties will be assessed for airport suitability and improved if required. This project will be the first to investigate conductive (direct contact) and convective (transmission through air) heat transfer through permeable pavements used in high-value heavy load-bearing infrastructure. I will use heat extracted from the ground (ground source energy system, GSES) in these new pavements to melt the deposited ice/snow and drain away the excess water. Conventional pavements can be heated by conduction only, whereas CRP can be heated through both conduction and convection (via the pores) as the novel pore structure also allows for natural convection. This Fellowship will, through extensive laboratory experimentation, computer modelling and the permanent large-scale deployment at Inverness Airport (spanning across multiple technology readiness levels (1-7), a measure of technology maturity), develop climate change resilient infrastructure materials that can be used to deliver a sustainable built environment resistant to flooding, ice/snow build-up and the harmful heat island effect. To achieve this ambitious goal, I will address significant structural, material, thermal and hydrological challenges with wide reaching economic, environmental and societal benefits to the construction and transportation sector.

The world is witnessing rapid urbanisation, where a large percentage of its population is expected to live within urban environments - circa 70% - by 2050 [1]. The main solution to urban immigration has been to construct tall buildings (TBs), which allow for a high-density population (and commercial activities) to reside in the hearts of our cities. However, recent years have witnessed increasing concerns regarding public health and wellbeing in dense urban environments. For instance, it is known that the urban heat island effect, where urban areas are typically some degrees hotter than the surrounding rural areas, can contribute to death rates during heatwaves [2]. To exacerbate these issues, as recognised by the London Plan [3], ''some climate change is inevitable..." and this is likely to increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, and the consequent urban health risks. The current COVID-19 crisis has also highlighted the importance of predicting pathogen dispersion and of efficient indoor/outdoor ventilation in urban areas [4]. It is, therefore, in the public interest to build healthy and sustainable urban environments by ensuring that air quality, transport of pollutant emissions, and the microclimate within cities (e.g. winds, temperatures, pollutant concentrations, and anthropogenic heat) do not reach unsustainable levels from poor urban development planning and lack of strategic directions. Recent initiatives are now promoting research on urban environmental health and sustainability (e.g. Public Health England's project Healthy-Polis). Despite the likely effects of the proliferation of tall structures in exacerbating some of the problems discussed above, current weather and air quality models do not cater for TBs and their long-lasting effects on the winds and temperature fields within urban neighbourhoods. This mostly relates to the dominant small scales of the phenomena under examination, in contrast to the spatial resolution that these models typically achieve (i.e. of the order of hundreds of metres) within the constraints of state-of-the-art computer power, resource availability, and turnaround time. On the other hand, the spatial resolution of computational fluid dynamics methods used in academia is much higher i.e. appropriate to resolve the presence of these urban towers. However, these research simulations often lack much of the physics needed to adequately capture real environmental flows (e.g. atmospheric conditions, heat exchange), and are generally run over much smaller domains. Hence, there is a dual need for more realistic detailed simulations and better parametrisations for larger-scale operational models, with the former informing development of the latter. To overcome these limitations, this project will employ a synergy of wind-tunnel tests, field observations, high-fidelity computer-aided analysis, and theoretical models. This will allow us to (i) understand the dependence of wind and temperature fields on the geometric parameters describing TBs both in isolation and as a cluster, and (ii) to develop parametrisations and open-source models that can be readily available to policymakers and regulators to assist them in building more resilient urban environments. The aim is to develop publicly available fast turnaround models that describe the effect of TBs on the quantities of interest for users with different levels of sophistication. This will include "rule-of-thumb" design principles aimed at local authorities and technical model parametrisations suitable for implementation in larger numerical weather prediction and air quality software to serve the professional and operational modelling community. References [1] Revision of World Urbanization Prospect (2018). DESA, UN. [2] Vardoulakis et al. (2016). Environmental Health 15, S30. [3] The London Plan (2017). Greater London Authority. [4] ECDC Tech. Report (2020). European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.