Building a Career in Sustainable Heritage: Christina Stuart’s Experience of the MSc

How did the MSc shape your career?

The MSc gave me both the insight and the confidence to work across disciplines. In my dissertation, I combined qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how people from different fields approach energy efficiency in historic buildings.

After graduating, I worked in a carbon life cycle assessment consultancy, then returned to architecture and began tutoring in this area at university level.

What drew me to my current role was the chance to work collaboratively, doing applied research on real projects and feeding this back into how we understand and care for heritage in practice.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone considering the MSc?

Heritage is a competitive field, so it’s useful to grow your network. The MSc offers great opportunities to connect with people like fellow students, lecturers, and professionals you meet on site visits or at events.

It also helps to think about the type of work you’d like to do after your studies and to use your dissertation to build and demonstrate relevant skills. 

After graduating, I got in touch to thank the case study partners I’d interviewed for my dissertation and one of them ended up offering me a job.

What makes heritage a powerful tool for sustainability?

There’s a real opportunity in looking to traditional buildings for ideas towards a fairer, greener future.

Take earthen buildings: built and maintained by the people who live in them, using local soil and materials. They were adapted to suit the local climate, are low in embodied carbon, and have lasted for generations.

Modern construction often depends on complex, carbon-intensive supply chains. So looking to traditional techniques, developed when resources were scarcer, can help us find more regenerative, community-led solutions today. 

How can sustainable heritage improve everyday life?

My home is a tenement flat, which is the most common type of housing in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In my view, the gentle density of historic urban flats like these is often more sustainable than one-off, bespoke eco-homes.

According to the Scottish Household Survey, tenements are the most energy-efficient dwelling type. Their compact form helps retain heat by sharing it between neighbours. They also tend to be in walkable neighbourhoods with lower car ownership, contributing to more sustainable patterns of living. Shared stairways and gardens bring neighbours together and help build a real sense of community.

What direction is the field heading in?

My sense is that conservation projects will have an increasing focus on the wider social value they add, beyond the physical work itself.

A great example is The Ridge, a Community Interest Company in the rural Scottish town of Dunbar. By working in partnership to restore derelict historic buildings and spaces, they’ve created training, jobs, and support for local people. This holistic, socially conscious approach is increasingly shaping heritage and conservation funding.

The focus isn’t solely on preserving the past but also about investing in a more inclusive and sustainable future.

Thank you to Christina for sharing her reflections.