Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Engineer who helped create iconic structures like Hong Kong International Airport before pioneering humanitarian engineering work in disaster recovery and urban
On the island
Eight records
David Bowie has really been the soundtrack to my life. My sister, who sadly died two years ago, introduced me to David Bowie when I was at school.
Clarinet Concerto in A (KV 622)
Jack Brymer with the London Symphony Orchestra
This music just simply reminds me of my childhood. I learnt to play the clarinet at school and loved it. It just brings back memories of being in my bedroom at home practising mum's cooking, family life, and it's the piece that my brother and I chose last year for my mum's funeral.
All the World Is GreenFavourite
The lyrics in this song are really mourning for a world that we've lost, where all the world is green and the environment comes first.
This one is for my partner Graham, who I met fifteen years ago. He was divorced with two small children and [o]vernight I became a stepmum.
This next song is really to remind me of an amazing period of my life where I was living in London, designing buildings, really enjoying being in my late twenties and early thirties. Life was about work, but it was also about clubbing and climbing.
The lyrics are just fantastic. They just sum up so brilliantly the absurdity of the way in which we destroy nature in order to build the world, the man-made world, that we think we want.
We had just climbed a mountain that no one had climbed before … and we were celebrating at the camp when a message came through on the radio saying that the Foreign Office said foreigners should leave Kyrgyzstan. … That was really the beginning too of a chapter in my life where I decided that I really wanted to use my skills to try and create a safer and fairer world.
This song really sort of sums up everything I feel, which is that it's such a shame that we as a human race can't wake up to the shared problem that we have, which is making the resources of this very precious planet stretch to meet the needs of everyone on the planet.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:10How much your ideas about what constitutes a beautiful structure have changed over the years?
Like many people of my vintage, we were brought up believing in high design, sort of glass and steel buildings that looked fantastic. And as my career has evolved, I've got less interested in what buildings look like, but really about the role that they play. You know, do they work as teaching environments? Do they make it easy for people to get to work? Are they hospitals that actually help people get better?
Presenter asks
9:42When you were four, the family came to the UK and you went to an old girls' boarding school in Kent. If we'd met you back then, would we have identified a budding engineer, do you think?
I loved making things. I took up dressmaking when I was about ten and made all my clothes. I go to Oxfam and get the evening dresses and chop them up and remake them into clothes. And I used to make models for my brother's train set. But I really sort of fell into engineering.
Presenter asks
20:24What were your first impressions [of the refugee camp in Tanzania]?
There were several hundred thousand people there. All they had was what they'd managed to carry with them over the border. And in those early weeks I saw the forest walk backwards like a retreating army as the refugees chopped it down for firewood … And I saw the water in the lake sort of go down, like watching someone drink a pint of beer.
The keepsakes
The book
Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker
I hope you're going to allow me to take the Boardman-Tasker omnibus, which is in fact a compilation of the four books that Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker wrote about their attempts to climb really challenging unclimbed peaks in the Himalayas in the 1970s. And they're just astonishing stories of human endeavour and survival. And I think it will just be an inspiration and keep me going.
The luxury
charpoy (traditional Indian rope bed)
I'd like a charpoy, which is a traditional Indian rope bed. I think it's better than a real bed, because I worry that a real bed will just get very soggy when it rains.
Presenter asks
22:30The scale of the engineering challenge is hard to overstate really. But when you add to that the human trauma that you were faced with, I think that would have broken a lot of people. How did you cope and what were you faced with?
I was sort of bottling a lot of what I was seeing. … I got cerebral malaria. And so when I came home, the thing that was most immediate was the fact that I'd had cerebral malaria and been very ill and nearly died. And it wasn't until two or three years later, when a boyfriend asked me the question that you've just asked, the lid came off all the traumatizing things that I'd seen … I suddenly was taken back to trying to build a raft bridge across a river between Rwanda and Uganda so that we could get food supplies in from Uganda. … I thought that what I was seeing in the river was the hippos, and then I realized that it wasn't. It was tens and then quite soon after hundreds of dead bodies that were coming down the river.
Presenter asks
23:49How did the experience [in Tanzania] change you?
I think I grew up a lot in a very short period of time. … I think that was the moment really I decided to be an engineer. Up until that moment, I had sort of drifted from school to university, to a job … but I don't think I decided I want to be an engineer. And I think that's what happened in Rwanda.
Presenter asks
30:25What's the biggest challenge that you're tackling at the moment [with Arup International Development]?
Climate change overlaid on the challenges of rapid urbanization, people moving into cities and cities growing very, very fast without time to plan them properly. And that's resulting in an awful lot of poverty and inequity. And it's a huge challenge because we've got a very limited amount of time to really change the situation.
“I didn't experience racism at home … it was when I left that it came into focus.”
“When you're on a building site, you have to wear steel-capped boots and a high-vi jacket. … [T]he only jacket that would be there would be sort of several sizes too big for me. … And then, of course, there was never a female toilet anywhere. … [I]t can kind of compromise your authority. If you're there to be the engineer … you don't want to look like you're drowning in somebody else's clothes, like a little girl who's sort of dressed up.”
“I realized that I could make a sort of solar powered shower panel with some glass sheet and some copper tubes and put it on the roof of the washroom.”
“I thought that what I was seeing in the river was the hippos, and then I realized that it wasn't. It was tens and then quite soon after hundreds of dead bodies that were coming down the river.”
“On the surface a temporary shelter looks like a sort of garden shed, but actually for the family who lives in it, it's a home.”