PROFESSOR SIR PETER HALL: ROLE MODEL Professor Sir Peter Hall: Role Model MICHAEL HEBBERT In a guest-editorial introduction to the ‘Built Environment’ special issue in celebration of Peter Hall, Michael Hebbert refl ects on the range and variety of his accomplishment. Diversity was a striking feature of the obituaries published after his death in 2014 and it shows through even more strongly in the present collection of papers from former students and collaborators. They refl ect on his legacy in a very personal way. Here was a man who modelled many roles and touched many lives: easy to love, hard to emulate, impossible to forget. … we were having a very enjoyable lunch at So who were his role models? It’s a long the Garrick, when he [Terry Heiser, Permanent roll-call but there are consistent patterns. As Secretary to the Department of the Environment] a writer he prized clarity and moral honesty, suddenly sprang a Heiser-type question: ‘Who are your role models?’ It more or less completely values learned from George Orwell, Arthur fl oored me and the other guest, who has produced Koestler, Frank Leavis, his Cambridge tutor some notable movies in his time. I don’t think either Gus Caesar, and Paul Barker (editor of New of us adequately rewarded Terry for that lunch. I’ve Society) among others. As a geographer he been thinking about the question ever since, and this admired social scientists who engaged with is by way of recompense. the evidence on the big scale: Alfred Mar- Thus Peter Hall introduced the memorable shall, Charles Booth, Beatrice Webb, Joseph inaugural lecture marking his professorial Schumpeter. In his planning pantheon were appointment to University College London in decision-makers such as Frank Pick, Patrick 1992. The lecture took shape as an intellectual Abercrombie, Michael Heseltine, Wulf Dase- autobiography spanning the entire trajectory king, who similarly saw the big picture and from boyhood in West Kensington through – as he put it when thanking the Royal Town wartime years in Blackpool, undergraduate Planning Institute for their Gold Medal in and postgraduate studies at Cambridge, 2003 – could walk the walk as well as talking journalism, teaching and policy engagements the talk. He liked academics unafraid to in swinging sixties London, his fi rst youthful engage with real-world challenges who could professorship at the University of Reading, multi-task, dictating their correspondence the move to the University of California at and writing their books on the hoof – May- Berkeley in 1980 and his return to England nard Keynes, Dudley Stamp, Richard Llewellyn- to take up the UCL chair at the age of sixty. Davies. He enjoyed collaborations with salty Peter updated his narrative two decades characters with iconoclastic streaks – John later in an ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ writt en Vaizey, Reyner Banham, Michael Young, as a personal contribution to our eightieth Manuel Castells, Colin Ward. He sniffed birthday festschrift The Planning Imagination. out pseudo-intellectualism and had no time After his death it was reprinted in the August for cultural affectations: it explains a certain 2014 issue of Town and Country Planning. estrangement from his parent discipline BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 41 NO 1 5 PROFESSOR SIR PETER HALL: ROLE MODEL of geography, a sore topic for the 1992 in- to Ebenezer Howard and the reviver of the augural, though less with the passage of decentralist garden cities movement, but years. also ‘the most urbane of urbanists’ (in the There’s a sense of organic unity in Peter words of the Financial Times) and leading Hall’s own telling of his career. The strands light of the big-city network Global Urban lead connectedly from childhood experiments Development. His legacies were detected in drawing Harry Beck’s London Under- at the wide scale of regional structure or ground map with coloured crayons, through in the detail of transport networks. His- Blackpool Grammar School and St Catharine’s torians hailed his genius in making sense Cambridge, to those first superb books of his of the past, technophiles his flair for futur- early career, the historical Industries of London ology. He was remembered for big data- and the prophetic London 2000. Having suc- crunching projects and for pioneering the cinctly captured the complexities of London’s UK application of numerical modelling of metropolitan geography he went on to do it land-use and transport systems, but also for for seven other capitals in the book World commonsensical weekly journalism and the Cities. His analyses of outer metropolitan land sort of readable scholarship embodied in this use and travel patterns developed into the very journal, which he edited for 36 years. monumental Containment of Urban England, From one perspective he was the essential which in turn included a narrative of plan- globalist, travelling astonishing numbers ning history that came to fruit in his texts of miles each year and always comparing Urban & Regional Planning and Cities of To- what he saw; but he was also deeply rooted morrow. That original intensive study of and an effective local champion in his home agglomeration and innovation in London’s territories of London, Blackpool and Man- industrial structure re-emerged in his seminal chester. American studies of sunbelt and gunbelt This commemorative issue of Built Environ- industry, silicon landscapes and techno- ment continues the multiplication of narra- polises, and lastly and most ambitiously tives around Peter Hall’s work and influence. in the thousand-page Cities in Civilization, Written by students and colleagues, its theme which is as much a work of comparative is a truly surprising diversity: it seems we all economic geography as it is a homage to knew the same individual yet each knew a Lewis Mumford. His final cluster of projects different man. The fourteen contributors on railway networks and sustainable, cover the entire span of his career from the polycentric settlement patterns connected moment he joined LSE in 1965 through to the right back to Frank Pick, Harry Beck and intense research activity of his last summer those coloured crayons. So in his life as well months in 2014. It’s extraordinary to be as in his work Peter did meet the precept of reminded of the scope of his life-work, the his undergraduate tutor Augustus Caesar: variety of roles he modelled for successive begin at the beginning and follow inexorably generations of students and colleagues, through logical argument to your final and the ramifications of his legacy. If the conclusions. ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ reveals Peter’s own After Peter’s death the obituaries had a moral compass, this collection shows the different logic. There were some common many different points to which it led him – elements – tribute to his encyclopaedic intel- and us. ligence, personal charm, exceptional product- The issue’s starting point is 1965 when ivity – but beyond that, each emphasized a Peter Hall arrived at the London School difference. Some highlighted his advocacy of Economics and John Goddard became of free enterprise, others his championship one of his first PhD students, working on of planning. He was remembered as the heir the London office boom and the efforts of 6 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 41 NO 1 PROFESSOR SIR PETER HALL: ROLE MODEL government to regulate it. The topic com- join his final Californian PhD cohort. Her bined methodological innovation in the latest paper’s unexpected excursions into the social techniques of quantitative geography with histories of blues and flamenco remind us intense policy relevance, and the paper shows how wide he could range. the brilliance with which Peter fostered both Nick Green opens the final sequence as sets of connections. My own experience one of the first PhD students of the Bartlett began four years later, in 1969. Newly gradu- years, working on a cultural-spatial analysis ated with a history degree (specialism: Later of artists’ studios in the East End of London. Roman Empire) I had visited Reyner Banham As with many other contributors, the at UCL in search of advice on how to become doctoral project led into an extended research a journalist specializing in urban issues. He collaboration, contributing to the POLYNET sensibly directed me to the University of project on European Spatial Structure from Reading where the newly installed Professor posts within the two non-profit organizations of Geography was a superb exponent of the that became Peter’s principal policy vehicles craft – not that I acquired it, though I learned after the turn of the century, Michael Young’s so much else, ending up 40 years later as Institute of Community Studies and the a Bartlett colleague. My Reading fellow- Town and Country Planning Association. students are represented in this issue by Basak Demires joined the team as a doctoral Peter Williams and Ray Wyatt, both of whom student funded by the wondrous windfall joined in 1972. The former’s investigation of from the Swiss Balzan Foundation, which gentrification in Islington launched a dis- named Peter as one of its 2005 prize-winners tinguished academic and professional career for his contributions to the history of the as one of the UK’s top housing experts, the modern European city. Her task was to latter was drawn from Australia by Reading’s analyse the role of telecommunications in reputation as a hot spot for urban modelling, Europe’s polycentric urban system, and her and his paper offers a quizzical account of the paper tells this story within a wider tribute ups and downs of the field internationally, to his contributions to location theory, in and Peter’s lasting role as translator of particular via translation, interpretation and computer output into policy input.