Professor Deborah Sugg Ryan

Professor Deborah Sugg Ryan is a historian, author and broadcaster.

A former V&A curator, she is a specialist in the history of housing, interiors, products and everyday life. Deborah is Professor of Design History and Theory at University of Portsmouth and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

A presenter and series consultant for BBC Two’s A House Through Time, she appears in all three series. The programme is a fresh way of telling social history through the residents of a single house over a 200-300 year period. Deborah brings the changing interior of the house to life in her segments.

Other appearances include BBC Two’s Inside the Factory, Business Boomers; More 4’s David Jason’s History of British Inventions’; Channel 4’s No 57: The Story of a House, Heaven, Hell or Suburbia. Deborah has contributed to BBC radio programmes including Your and Yours, Woman’s Hour and Laurence Llewellyn Bowen’s History of Home.

She has also written for The Conversation and popular magazines and is frequently called on as an expert commentator on design history for newspapers. 

Deborah is the author of three books. Her first book The Ideal Home Through the Twentieth Century (Hazar) told the story of the Ideal Home Show from its founding in 1908 to the present. Her second book Ideal Homes, 1918-39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester University Press) was awarded the 2020 Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period After 1800 and also shortlisted for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 2019 for an outstanding contribution to architectural history.

It was reissued as a trade book in April 2020 with the title Ideal Homes: Uncovering the History and Design of the Interwar House, with a new introduction on researching your house history.

She is currently writing a history of the modern kitchen, which will be published by for Reaktion.

Deborah has put her interest in the history of housing into practical use by renovating 6 houses, including a Grade II listed Georgian terrace, and an interwar ‘time capsule’ semi.

She is represented for media work by Knight Ayton Management.