The career trajectory of Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was spectacular. He moved from being the son of a bankrupt woodcarver in Penzance to the pinnacle of London metropolitan science as President of the Royal Society in the 1820s. From immediately after his death to the present, biographers and historians who wrote about Davy have struggled to make sense of him as his character presented so many features, some apparently contradictory: philosopher, chemist, geologist, lecturer, poet, applied scientist, snob, social climber, and ultimate failure among many others. In part these characterisations arose from imposing modern categories on him, so, as a start at reinterpreting his life and career, this talk will locate Davy firmly in various workplaces rather than just in the laboratory and lecture theatre of the Royal Institution. Sites where Davy worked included the hospital, the tanning yard, the farm, the prison, coal mines, archaeological museums and the dockyard. In all of these, Davy was either ordered or invited to provide chemical understanding of the materials and processes involved. Indeed the only chemical research that Davy seems to have conducted entirely on his own account was his electro-chemistry. Despite being involved in a variety of working environments, Davy held strongly to the belief that what would work in the specialised and controlled space of the laboratory would necessarily function in the outside world – a belief that on more than one occasion led him to disaster. Furthermore, Davy viewed himself primarily as a philosopher, but the overwhelming evidence is that he spent the vast majority of his time undertaking science with a practical aim, which he sought, with some success, to turn to philosophical account. It was this very success in projecting this disjunction about himself which, it will be argued, contributed significantly to the development of the contradictory historical literature about Davy, a state of confusion which begins to disappear if one studies what Davy did, rather than what he and others said he did.