I trained as an architect and during my undergraduate university course I went to India and became fascinated with Indian architecture. Then I went to London to study Indian archaeology, which was not what I had set out to do. Even so, my second degree is in Indian archaeology and my specialty was Indian temple architecture. From architecture I extended my interests to the visual arts, to sculpture and painting, and then to what I might call the historical context of building, especially patronage and the development of religious cults. The landscape broadened. I have completed quite a number of different projects over the years, including one in Bengal on terracotta temple architecture. I have been interested in Islamic architecture and I have worked at various sites in the Deccan. Since the beginning of 1980, I have been at Vijayanagara.

Vijayanagara is a great ruined site, the capital of the very important empire that was set up in the wake of the Muslim incursions into south India at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It was sacked by the armies of the Sultans in 1565. Surprisingly, this site had never been properly examined. The reason for this is that the art historians and professional scholars who work on the visual arts of India (particularly Indian and American scholars) have always thought of Vijayanagara as being second-rate. I was often asked: 'Why do you want to go there? The sculpture is no good, and the architecture is repetitive.' This dismissal was the sort of argument that used to be applied to Renaissance and Baroque art. Renaissance is acceptable, but Baroque is really late Renaissance, therefore inferior. When I was a student, Roman architecture was described as mechanical, repetitive, great or large, but never to be compared with Greek architecture.