The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 marked the start of England's transition from a peripheral European state to one with global ambitions. Just 175 years later, a recently united Britain emerged from the Seven Years War (1756-1763) as a front-rank European power with an expanding overseas empire. To develop the commercial and colonial potential of this maritime empire, England's traders, merchants, and shipowners invested in new ships, forged new trade routes, expanded the merchant fleet, increased size of the maritime labour force, and developed new skills for blue ocean sailing. Remarkably, the evolution of these processes has yet to be fully investigated. This period of proto-globalisation is of fundamental importance to contemporary Britain. The recent removal of statues of people associated with this expansion demonstrates the strength of the discourse surrounding this subject and reflects a wider dialogue that seeks to refine and reshape discussions of England's (and Britain's) role in imperial conquest. Knowing how maritime communities lived and worked across this period of English seaborne development will add much to scholarship and the general public's understanding of the role past societies played in this expansion. This research will foreground the voices and lives of the maritime community, shifting the focus away from the dominant personalities of the period, such as Francis Drake, or specific sectors of this expansion, such as the slave trade, and bring to the fore less famous but just as important figures in England's maritime past. This project will bring their stories to life, and analyse in detail the size and geographical distribution of this group, demonstrating important periods of change. This period of England's transition to a global maritime power can be investigated through the rich seam of extant source materials. In England a sophisticated customs service meant that merchants trading overseas (imports and exports) had to pay tax. Therefore, every ship that imported and exported goods had its name and its home port recorded in a set of records called port books, and from 1565 England's extensive coastal trade was also documented. Additionally, the name of every ship's master, the merchants, and the commodities carried, were also recorded. Some 20,000 of these port books survive in The National Archives and form the basis of this project. These sources allow us to precisely map the evolution of English shipping capacity (size and regional distribution) and maritime trade. These rich source materials allow us to investigate the size and geographical distribution of England's maritime communities, and examine their socio-cultural lives, unlocking, for the first time, details of their lives afloat and ashore. We will reconstruct their careers, examine their marriage strategies, and demonstrate the important role women played in their lives, as wives, daughters, hostellers, but also as active traders working side-by-side in commerce. We have the following objectives: 1. To create a freely available dataset (c.200,000 entries) through an interdisciplinary approach using computer science to integrate several different data series on English shipping and maritime communities. This will encourage future research by making our data publicly available through our project website. 2. To use our new data to offer enriched biographies of members of the maritime community as England transitioned to a global power, allowing us, for the first time, to undertake a longitudinal examination of a group that was fundamental to the life-blood of England's economy and society. 3. To showcase how co-designed and co-produced research can successfully engage a public audience, and determine what academics can learn from community participatory research. This will create a methodology for working with a variety of professionals that can be applied to future projects in this field.

It is widely recognised that ecosystems provide numerous services that are of benefit to humans but, in decisions regarding land and resource use, these tend to be overlooked. Within towns and cities this is particularly the case as nature is often considered to be absent in urban areas. However, as nearly 80% of the UK population live in urban areas there is considerable potential for improvements in ecosystem services to have a large impact on quality of life. As a result the Defra funded Ecosystem Services in the Urban Water Environment (ESUWE) project has begun to apply an ecosystem services approach to demonstrate the benefits that improvements in the urban water environment can have. It has also been recognised that a collaborative approach to decision making assists with the integrated planning that is required for sustainable catchment management. Therefore, the work of ESUWE also aims to provide tools to communicate and engage stakeholders in order to facilitate a participatory approach to catchment management. The ESUWE project has identified numerous ecosystem services provided in urban environments and developed metrics to quantify the costs and benefits associated with these. It is now working in four demonstration areas of varying sizes to map and evaluate ecosystem services and to pilot use in local catchment planning. It is hoped that by communicating information about benefits of environmental improvements, decisions can be better informed and that by mapping ecosystem services, areas where interventions will result in multiple-benefits can be identified and prioritised. Throughout the ESUWE project, Green Infrastructure (GI) has been highlighted as being important for delivering benefits to urban societies along with providing environmental and hydrological improvements. Therefore, the potential to expand the scope of the work beyond those directly involved with catchment planning has been identified. The Innovation Project will enable the application of the research conducted under the ESUWE project to meet the needs of a wider range of end users such as local nature partnership, local planning authorities and construction companies to be investigated so that the impact of the work can be increased. The Innovation Project will facilitate co-development of an ecosystem services mapping approach to the planning of GI with those responsible for land use decisions at local and national levels. This will ensure that the needs of end users are incorporated into the development of decision support tools that facilitate GI planning and help create standardised metrics that can express the benefits of GI for use in differing sectors. Work in four demonstration areas will explore the practical application of the ecosystem services approach, demonstrating the benefits provided by GI and identifying opportunities for these to be increased. This will improve strategic understanding so that the effects of potential land use decisions on levels of services provided in urban area can be explored. This will help to provide an evidence base that can inform decisions regarding trade-offs and promote interventions that provide increased and multiple benefits. The Innovation Project will also result in case studies quantifying the value of GI which can be used to promote the need for increased considerations of its provision in land use decision at both local and national levels. A partnership approach will also identify how mapping can aid integrated local decision making to support other place based initiatives. Finally, by considering how GI can be implemented in a way that delivers multiple benefits, best practice will be identified and promoted.

The UK's carbon targets, as defined by the Climate Change Act of 2008, specify an emissions reduction of 80% by 2050, which the government has recently revised down to 'net zero' for the same year. In 2017, 17% of the UK's carbon emissions were associated with non-electric use in the residential sector (64.1 Mt CO2), the majority of which were associated with natural gas space heating, cooking and domestic hot water. The UK must therefore decarbonise residential heat to be able to meet its climate change targets, but, in combination with electric vehicles (EVs), this could lead to a 200-300% increase in the UK's annual electricity demand. In terms of deployment at scale, Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP) operating either in isolation or as a hybrid gas system appear a key technology as they are not site specific and are applicable to both new build housing and retrofit. The UK's low voltage (LV) electricity network will not however, be able to operate with unconstrained electrical heating or EV charging loads. Both loads must be deferrable or scheduled in a manner to support the electricity network and maintain substations and feeders within limits. Household electric heating has the potential to operate as a significant deferrable load which LATENT is seeking to understand and harness. This can provide benefits across scales, namely to the UK (energy security and carbon targets), DNO (Distributed Network Operator as grid support), heat pump suppliers (by demonstrating added grid value), householders (in terms of bill reduction and avoidance of peaking dynamic tariffs) and electricity suppliers by applying aggregation techniques to minimise energy service costs. The key aim of LATENT therefore, is to be able to predict the impact of customers with electrical heating (predominantly ASHP) operating with 3rd party deferrable heating control on the LV network at the feeder / substation level. 3rd party control in this context would be through the energy service supplier, with whom, unlike the DNO, a household has an existing financial contract relationship. LATENT will inform industry of the potential of 3rd party control of deferrable heat through a rigorous field experiment, and, in doing so, accelerate the transition to decarbonised household heating. LATENT will determine the influence of householder personality trait (OCEAN traits: either positive / negative as Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) alongside more traditional Census metrics such as educational attainment, house type etc to deliver a multi-variate regression model to describe deferrable heat reduction at the household level. A substation or feeder can then be analysed in terms of its household type mix (10% C+ detached, 30% E- flat etc) to produce a composite substation level, deferrable heat reduction estimate. This model will be realised through field trials with LATENT's industrial partner, Igloo Energy. Igloo have a customer base with smart heating systems and ASHP which support remote 3rd party control. LATENT will test (i) householder's stated acceptance to deferral of heating (in terms of temperature drop and duration) through focus groups and surveys, (ii) actual acceptance of heat deferral through heating season field trials, and (iii) operation of a commercial deferrable heat tariff with a sample of Igloo's customer base.

It is now widely accepted that if current private car use trends continue then urban road networks will become increasingly unable to cope with the demand for travel, with existing traffic management techniques unable to achieve desired levels of both sustainability and safety. While much research effort has been directed towards this issue there has been a dichotomy between supply side solutions (for example flow responsive traffic signals) and demand side solutions (such as encouraging high occupancy vehicles and public transport use). The ultimate merging of these two approaches would result in signal priority being given based on an environmentally friendly vehicle occupancy scale (from hybrid/electric public transport at one end to single occupancy large engine cars at the other) with clear sustainability, economic and environmental benefits. The required real-time data sources and technologies to achieve this are only now beginning to be created however and forward looking research is now essential to shape the characteristics of these data sources and quantify the benefits which they facilitate. Since the introduction of demand responsive traffic signal control in the 1970s, urban traffic control (UTC) systems have attempted to optimise traffic signal stage lengths and stage orders based on real time traffic detector data. While much research has been carried out since this time to improve the optimality of the underlying algorithms however, the initial data source of inductive loop or above ground (e.g. infrared) detectors have remained fundamental to the operation of the system. In order to give the maximum opportunity for a set of traffic signals to react to approaching traffic, the detectors used to provide the input data for each arm of the junction are generally located as far upstream as possible often the exit stream from the upstream junctions. While this reliance on upstream detectors gives the greatest warning of approaching traffic it also means that the UTC system must make estimations of the stop line arrival times of vehicles, suffering from errors related to platoon dispersion and indeed the variable speed nature of urban driving. The development of GPS/Galileo technologies for individual vehicle positioning, accompanied by advances in wireless communications technologies however provides increasing opportunity to establish the position of vehicles not just at a single upstream detector location, but continuously along the approaching arm. This would provide the UTC systems with significant increased detail in relation to real-time traffic demand, allowing for more detailed stage adjustments and a transformation from the current discrete decision approach to one of continuous response to approaching demands.The focus of this research is therefore the creation of traffic signal control algorithms based on the real-time positions of individual vehicles and, through the creation of a simulation test bed, the quantification of the benefits in relation to the reductions (compared to existing signal control methods) in both delays and emissions that such an algorithm could achieve, a critical step towards achieving an environmentally and economically sustainable road transport system.

Cycling can contribute to physical and mental health and wellbeing among the older population by providing an active means of independent mobility to connect with the community and engage in social activities. But whilst cycling accounts for 23 per cent of all journeys for people aged 65 and older in the Netherlands, 15 per cent in Denmark and 9 per cent in Germany, it represents only 1 per cent of all journeys in the UK. This research starts from the premise that older people in the UK are often portrayed as citizens who lack the capacity to cycle and that this translates into design guidance that fails to consider how the built environment could be transformed to support cycling amongst an ageing population. As people age, cycling becomes more physically challenging, forcing many to stop. Some people do adapt to changing physical circumstances and continue to cycle in older age. However, many lack the desire to cycle because of risks associated with its practice in an unsupportive environment and fear of personal injury. Projects to improve cycle infrastructure coupled with the growth in availability of assistive technologies such as electric bicycles ('e-bikes') could have a significant role in creating opportunities for older people to return to cycling or prevent them from giving up. The aim of this research is to better understand how built environment and technological design is shaping the willingness and ability of older people to cycle, how they interact and experience the built environment when cycling, and how this affects their wellbeing. Attention will focus on elements of design at different scales from buildings, to neighbourhoods, to wider town networks and also on bicycle technology and equipment. The research will investigate the range of policies and programmes and guidance available across the EU targeted at promoting more inclusive cycling amongst the older population and compare this with activity in the UK. A range of existing UK data sources will be analysed to identify trends in participation in cycling across the in the UK and the extent to which recent projects and programmes are encouraging older people to cycle. A mix of innovative methods to understand the relationship between cycling in the built environment and wellbeing will be used with residents approaching later life (aged 50-59) and in later life (60+) across the Bristol, Oxford, Reading and Southampton areas. First, biographic ('cycling life-history') interviews will be conducted in order to understand the role of past experiences of cycling and the influence of life events such as family and social relationships, employment and wider social, economic, environmental and technological change; Second, mobile interviews and observation will be conducted with participants as they make a regular journey by cycle in order to capture their everyday experience of cycling and to measure how interaction with the built environment affects mental physical and mental wellbeing; Third, new and returning older cycle users will be invited to take part in a unique 8-week experiment to measure how their (re)engagement with both conventional and electric cycling in the built environment affects their physical and mental wellbeing. A rich dataset incorporating qualitative (textual, cartographic, video) and quantitative (numerical measures of wellbeing) data will be used to develop a toolkit for use by policy makers and practitioners. This will advise how the built environment and technology could be designed to support and promote cycling amongst current and future older generations and provide evidence of how this could improve independent cycling mobility and health and wellbeing. The toolkit will include briefing notes linked to design guidance and a documentary video, made with participants of the study, distributed directly to policy makers, practitioners and stakeholder and made available on the Web with the aim of generating maximum impact.