Roger Bowdler was Director of Listing at Historic England, where
he worked on the protection of historic buildings from 1989 until
2018. Beginning as a historian working on London buildings, he
ended up as Director of Listing, responsible for all recommendations
to the government for protecting buildings, landscapes, battlefields,
archaeological sites and shipwrecks, and on the managing board of
the national conservation body. He gained a PhD from the University
of Cambridge in 1991 on 17th century funerary monuments, and
is now returning to the topic of commemorative art: a book on
tombstones in churchyards is his current writing project. He has
contributed numerous articles and chapters in various books and
journals, including the Soane and Death exhibition at the Dulwich
Picture Gallery (1996), and has written on a wide range of subjects,
from 1930s airports to fairground rides, from archaeology policy to
the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais.
