Dr. Celia Clark lives in Portsmouth and was a founder member of the
Portsmouth Society , a voluntary group which campaigns to preserve the best of the city's environment: buildings, streets, open spaces, harbour and seashore and to encourage design excellence in new buildings and urban spaces.
As well as locally, she works at national and international level. As Education Officer of the Civic Trust she and colleagues at the National Trust and English Heritage worked to ensure that education in, about and for the built environment was a key part in the first draft of the National Curriculum. With colleagues in the Civic Trust's Regeneration Unit she encouraged young people and local communities to take an active part in reshaping their neighbourhoods. She edited Shaping Place, a national environmental education broadsheet for teachers.
Her master's degree dissertation at Oxford Brookes focussed on the future of four historic dockyards - in Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham and Venice Arsenale. She extended this research in her report: Vintage Ports: differing futures for historic dockyards across Europe published by the University of the West of England in 2000, which was welcomed by defence ministries in several countries. Naval Dockyards Society
She currently is working on a book exploring how historic dockyard towns across the world are reinvented themselves following defence cuts and closures, to be published by the Wessex Institute of Technology.
The proposal to inscribe Portsmouth Harbour, the Isle of Wight and Spithead onto the World Heritage list - http://www.rad.clara.net/heritage - was inspired by a Three Walled Cities project linking Portsmouth, Obidos in Portugal and Xingcheng in Liaoning Province in North Eastern China, which she helped to put together.
