He is the oldest son of Rowley Atterbury and puppeteer Audrey Atterbury (née Holman),[1] who worked on the 1950s children's Watch With Mother programme Andy Pandy for the BBC and who, it is claimed, based the character's appearance on that of her son.

He most frequently curates for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, his exhibitions there including "Pugin: a Gothic Passion" (1994) and "Inventing New Britain: the Victorian Vision" (2001).

When British Waterways commissioned Robert Nicholson Publications to produce a series of guides to their waterways in the early 1970s, Atterbury and Andrew Darwin were supplied with a chartered boat and a student to drive it, in which they toured the canal network, producing the material for what became the first edition of the Nicholson Guides.

[4] In 2007, Atterbury appeared on Channel 4's archaeology series Time Team talking about Augustus Pugin, and in 2009 he narrated BBC Four's documentary The Last Days of the Liners which examined how, in the years following World War II, countries competed to launch the most magnificent passenger ships on the great ocean routes.

[6] Atterbury is the owner of the only remaining Teddy puppet from the television series Andy Pandy that is not kept as part of a museum collection; it was originally a gift to his mother.