The idea for the Resilient Materials for Life (RM4L) programme grant was conceived by a team of investigators from Cardiff, Cambridge, Bath and Bradford universities, and developed from the forerunner Materials for Life (M4L) project. The latter was successfully completed in 2016 and culminated with a site trial in which multiple new self-healing materials were used to form a series of structures on a live construction site. M4L proved the viability of self-healing construction materials but the team recognised that a more sustained and wider-ranging research effort was required for the potential of biomimetic construction materials to be fully realised.