Having obtained his first degree from Oxford University, Ian Salisbury worked for several years in the commodities market, also running a horticultural smallholding in the midlands, and occasionally designing and building for himself, his family and friends. He obtained his architectural qualifications in his early thirties, training and qualifying concurrently in law.
During the latter part of his professional training he was employed in local government, his last appointment before qualifying being the Head of Architecture at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.
In 1985 he opened an office in Oxford for the design practice of Maguire and Murray, then setting up and accepting the directorship of Maguire & Co and Maguire & Co International.
In 1990, with Paul Hyett and Adam Whiteley he founded Hyett Salisbury Whiteley in London and Oxford. In 2000, when that firm was bought up by a larger firm from the north-east, he opened his own consultancy practice in Oxford.
During his career as an architect Ian Salisbury has had responsibility as design project leader and contract administrator for a wide variety of building types, with particular experience in higher education, schools, commercial, ecclesiastical and residential buildings. He developed his interest in conservation practice over 10 years when he was the College Architect for Pembroke College, Oxford University. Then, from 2000 until 2023, he was the Cathedral Architect at Leicester where he has overseen several major repair schemes, the re-ordering of the cathedral following the re-interment of the remains of King Richard III, and the making of a new landscape for the precinct gardens.
Ian Salisbury’s parallel practice has been as a consultant advising on dispute avoidance and resolution, acting as a chartered arbitrator, mediator, expert witness and adjudicator. Significant public consultancy appointments have included Heathrow Terminal 5 and the London Olympics.
Ian Salisbury has contributed to his two professions by serving as the Honorary Secretary of the RIBA, as Trustee of the British Architectural Library, as Director of the Construction Industry Council, and as a member of the Architects Registration Board. He is a Past President of the Society of Construction Arbitrators and has served as the Honorary Treasurer of the Cathedral Architects Association. He is a senior member of Pembroke College, Oxford and is an occasional lecturer and examiner at Cambridge University.
Cosmology
In 2025, intending initially to become more fluent in the use of artificial intelligence, Ian Salisbury returned to cosmology, a long-standing interest. The exercise developed rather further than intended. Starting from his own underlying idea, and with sustained technical assistance from AI, he developed the Time-Symmetric Parity Constraint (TSPC, or the Twin-Time theory): an alternative approach to cosmology. This presents a radical departure from what is referred to as the Standard Model. It dispenses with such unseen and, as yet, unproven concepts as Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Inflation and replaces them all with a simple mathematical constraint. It seeks to explain more by assuming less and, importantly, to make predictions capable of proving the proposition wrong.
What, then, is TSPC? It starts with the idea that the Universe is more symmetrical than conventional cosmology assumes. It proposes that time has two opposite directions, rather like a road running both ways, and that the two are bound together by a fundamental symmetry. This simple rule limits the possible shape and behaviour of spacetime.
No new particles, forces or other unseen ingredients are required. Instead, the model describes rules that the geometry of the Universe obeys. That, in turn, changes how time, distance, redshift and gravity are related and removes the plethora of elaboration that the proponents of the Standard Model have developed in order for it to work.
TSPC asks a simple question: could effects usually explained by Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Inflation instead be consequences of this more tightly constrained geometry? What if Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Inflation are mirages? In short, rather than adding unseen things to the Universe to explain what we observe, TSPC asks whether the explanation might lie in the structure of spacetime itself.
The mathematics is substantial, but it is not necessary to understand Greek letters and equations in order to understand the argument. The TSPC website provides the complete collection, while It’s all Greek to me! is an introduction written specifically for readers interested in the Universe but disinclined to approach it through complex mathematics.
There is also a methodological challenge in the work. Cosmology is, perhaps inevitably, a conservative science. A vast intellectual and financial infrastructure, what might reasonably be called a “Dark Matter Economy”, has grown up around the Standard Model. NASA’s $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, due for launch in 2026 and designed in part to investigate Dark Matter and Dark Energy, is only one element of an international research effort involving major telescopes, particle accelerators, underground detectors and thousands of scientists. With so much intellectual and financial investment in the existing framework, anomalous observations tend to be addressed by modifying its contents or parameters rather than questioning its underlying geometrical assumptions. TSPC carries none of that baggage. Instead of making the model increasingly flexible when observations prove awkward, it imposes a restrictive geometrical rule and asks observation to break it. If the constraint is wrong, it should fail.
That is a challenging proposition for an independent researcher to put to an established scientific discipline. But the collection is not presented as an assertion of correctness or as a substitute for observational evidence. It is a publicly available, timestamped programme of argument, prediction, and attempted falsification. Resistance from the established cosmological community is both expected and welcomed. The theory will stand or fall on observation and evidence, which is the very essence of scientific enquiry.
Photo: building a house in a day, Ban Bong, Louangphabang, Laos: Ian Salisbury
