Rosie Brigham is a PhD student in Citizen Heritage Science at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, The Bartlett.

In 2020, she launched ‘Monument Monitor’, a collaborative project with Historic Environment Scotland, which aims to assess to what extent visitor photographs of heritage sites can be used to inform conservation and monitoring efforts.

But national restrictions throughout the Covid-19 crisis meant that hardly anyone was visiting sites and taking photos, resulting in a huge loss of data collection for the project. 

Rosie quickly re-thought her methodology, and asked the public to send in their old photos for analysis instead. She received over a thousand snaps. “It was a wonderful thing during this stressful national time to be able to share these experiences with people and see the sites in a different way.”