Upton's research in dialectology began at Swansea, where as an MA student he was one of the original fieldworkers on the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (SAWD).
After a lectureship at the University of Malawi, he began his long association with the Survey of English Dialects (SED) at the University of Leeds, where he joined the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies as a research assistant to Harold Orton on the Survey's Linguistic Atlas of England.
Between 2002 and 2005 Upton, with Oliver Pickering, led the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) project, which made the collections of the former Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies accessible to those with interests in the speech, customs, beliefs and practices of traditional British communities.
Local radio journalists collected examples of speech from around the country, and Upton coordinated the group which analysed the data generated by the initiative.
[2] The findings were published in Analysing Twenty-first Century British English (London: Routledge, 2013), co-edited with Bethan L. Davies.