Born 19 April 1970, educated at Queen's College, Oxford, Minton has worked as a foreign correspondent, business reporter and social affairs writer and has won a number of national journalism awards.

After a decade in journalism, including a period spent as a staff member of the Financial Times, Minton began to focus on larger projects for various think tanks and policy organisations, which culminated in her writing her first book, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City (Penguin, 2009)[1][2] is a book which looks at the ownership of various UK cities to investigate the effect and nature of public space.

Minton's interest in public space took root when she wrote a series of reports on the polarisation and privatisation of cities.

She is a Reader[3] in Architecture at the University of East London where she is Programme Leader of UEL's new post graduate MRes course, Reading the Neoliberal City.

[4] In 2016 she co-edited, with Paul Watt, a special edition of the journal CITY, focusing on the housing crisis, which informed research for Big Capital.