He was awarded the Craven travelling fellowship at Magdalen College, which he used to study archaeology in Great Britain and France.
During the Second World War, Ward-Perkins saw military service in the British Royal Artillery in North Africa.
He maintained a scholarly interest in North Africa, largely because excavation work in Italy remained impossible.
In the 1950s his interest focused on the technical aspects of Roman construction and resulted in The Shrine of St Peter and the Vatican Excavations (1956) and David Talbot Rice's The Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors (1958).
In 1963 Ward-Perkins revived the stalled publication project of the Corpus signorum imperii Romani, a body of Roman sculpture held in collections throughout the world.
He served as visiting professor in numerous institutions, including New York University (1957) and as Rhind Lecturer in Edinburgh in 1960.
He wrote works on city planning in classical Greece and Rome and the historical topography of Veii.