Anna Minton is a writer and journalist. She has worked as a foreign correspondent, business reporter and social affairs writer and is the winner of five national journalism awards. After a decade in journalism she began to focus on longer projects for think tanks and policy organisations. She is the author of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Viewpoint on fear and distrust and a member of the writers’ panel for the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. She appears regularly on television and radio and is a contributor to The Guardian.

The idea for Ground Control emerged from a series of three agenda setting reports. The first focused on gated communities and ghettoes in the US, questioning to what extent these trends are emerging in the UK. The second, ‘Northern Soul’, looked at polarisation and culture in one British city, Newcastle, and the third, ‘What kind of World Are We Building?’ investigated the growing privatisation of public space.