Sir Peter Hall: 1932-2014

Sir Peter Hall, who died on 30 July at the age of 82, was the UK’s foremost post-war geographer and planning academic. A prolific writer, he authored more than 50 books and countless papers. His work spanned theory and practice and he served as an advisor to governments at home and abroad. His transport interests were wide-ranging. In the 1970s and 80s he undertook research on converting railway lines into roads. He then became an enthusiastic supporter of high-speed rail and sat on the advisory panel of high-speed rail lobbying organisation Greengauge 21. He also served on Transport for London’s peer review group to oversee work on a Thames estuary airport and co-authored the Better Stations taskforce report set up by transport secretary Lord Adonis in 2009. 

After receiving his Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge, Hall began his academic career at Birkbeck in 1957 as a lecturer in geography. He taught at the London School of Economics before joining the University of Reading, where he became dean of the faculty of urban and regional studies. In the 1980s he took up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. He was appointed chair of planning at The Bartlett, University College London in 1989, and knighted in 1998 for services to the Town and Country Planning Association, of which he remained president until his death. 

Professor Matthew Carmona on behalf of The Bartlett, said: “Peter’s intellectual curiosity and physical energy was legendary, as was his encyclopedic mind about all things planning (and anything to do with trains). Despite his illness, which he never complained about but simply accepted, Peter was working at full pelt on ideas for the future, including developing new research and hatching student projects, right up until his final few days.”

The Royal Town Planning Institute said: “Equally at home discussing geography, architecture, history, political science, welfare economics, social psychology as well as planning he combined a highly distinguished academic career with advising successive governments on planning policy.” RTPI president Cath Ranson added: “An intellectual colossus, he straddled theory and practice, managing to make planning not only interesting and accessible to any audience he wanted to, but fun too. The true mark of his influence is that he was one of the very few academics whose name is instantly recognisable by those outside his discipline.”

Kate Henderson, chief executive of the TCPA, said Sir Peter “more than any other post-war figure kept the cause of planning alive through difficult times”. “Though horrified by the growing inequality of cities like London he was above all a man full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of better places and how they could be achieved. There is also no doubt that Peter would have raised a wry smile to our current grief and pressed us to move on with his drive for sociable, inclusive and sustainable cities. Despite his great modesty, Peter was one of the very few thinkers capable of a credible grand vision of the future.”

David Banister, professor of transport studies at the school of geography and the environment, University of Oxford, said: “Peter was a friend, an inspiration and a mentor. I knew him for more than 40 years – we were colleagues at the University of Reading and the Bartlett School of Planning in University College London (1992-2006), and we jointly edited the journal Built Environment for nearly 25 years.

“Peter was the greatest urbanist and planner of the last 50 years, making outstanding academic contributions to debates around the future of London, London’s motorways and the need for a new airport, new towns, regeneration and Enterprise Zones, high-speed rail, and many other topics. 

“His advice was frequently sought by governments in the UK and overseas, and he was an inveterate traveller trying to visit as many countries as possible, where interesting ideas in transport and planning were being tried out. 

“Peter was a very approachable person, always finding time for debate and discussion with the most important and with those just starting out on their careers. He was extremely proud of the huge numbers of PhD students that he supervised, and many of these are now in very senior positions. He was a fabulous conversationalist with an encyclopaedic memory and a wry sense of humour when he talked about life and travel – he was a great raconteur.”

Peter Headicar, a reader of transport planning at Oxford Brookes University, said: “Peter’s knowledge of cities past and present was prodigious and his academic output awesome. And yet perhaps his most remarkable talent was his ability to communicate an infectious enthusiasm for his subject and a lifelong belief in the role of planning in enabling better lives.”

LTT’s editorial director, Peter Stonham, said: “Peter had made a huge contribution to thinking and professional practice in linking transport and planning, going beyond the conventional land-use transportation connection and embracing economic development, national connectivity and wider social and economic issues. He had an amazingly fertile mind and ability to connect with politicians and other professionals, rather than simply seeing things from a planner’s perspective. He redefined the role of the geographer as an analyst of changing human needs and opportunities.” 

In the last few years Stonham had close connections with Sir Peter, including leading the EU Sintropher project studying the improvement of regional connectivity within Europe’s more peripheral areas. “Sir Peter had an amazingly sharp mind and energy level, even into his 80s, and clearly wasn’t going to step back until it was physically and mentally impossible for him.” 

Jim Steer, the founder of Greengauge 21, said: “He called me a few months ago to ask whether there was anything that could be done to counter the attacks being made on the case for HS2 – a development which he totally supported. He will be missed, but not forgotten, across the planning profession.”

Carmen Hass-Klau writes:

I met Peter Hall in 1977. He was the first real professor I had met in my life. I had not been short of contact with professors, coming from the Technical University of Berlin with a completed degree. But Peter was different from what I had known before. He was charismatic, his lectures were fascinating, and the international research he did at the time was interesting. Although he was even in 1977 already a well-known professor, travelling a lot and knowing everything one needed to know about planning, he was not at all pompous and it was easy to be with him on first name terms. He also had a gift of making you feel important, even as a student, and he listened to your arguments. 

We did several research projects together, some were a bit mad like the Woodhead Tunnel where Peter wanted to convert disused railway lines into roads and the Marlborough railway station into a bus station. Luckily nothing came of it. 

Peter has always been very interested in anything to do with Germany, some of this interest may have been related to his not so happy first marriage; his wife was of German origin. Coming from Germany and having a planning degree gave us a constant source of discussion of the differences between the UK and Germany. But it was not only Germany he was captivated by, it was the planning approach of other countries too. In the early 1980s, Peter and I worked together on a research project that later became a well-known book Can rail save the city?. We did not quite see eye-to-eye on the results but Peter did not really mind. He did not need people around him who always had the same opinion to him. He could live with a rebel like me who believed that it was easy to design town centres without cars, and public transport needed to be promoted in order to give cities a chance to survive. The most important experience I had was at the end of this project. It was amazing how Peter could change in a very short time the dreary research report I had produced into a readable and important book.

Peter got a Berkeley professorship in city and regional planning in 1980. I had visited him the year before and he was proud to show me around. He was then a passionate car driver and could drive for hours on end, hence I saw a lot of California. He loved California (his second wife was less taken – she was too European for the US). During his 12 years in California we did not lose contact because I had started my PhD, and again I learned a lot from him during the time I wrote it. He always had plenty of time for me. We met regularly and discussed all my chapters with great vigour. Finally when I thought I was finished – I had sent him my last chapter and we had agreed a meeting – he simply said forget about this chapter, tear it up and write it again. He advised me to spend a day on the Downs and think ‘why did you want to write this PhD and what do you really want to say after three years of work?’. So I did and in later life I quite often used this advice with my own PhD students.

One of Peter’s great strengths was his historical approach to planning. He had the gift to imagine how planning, zeitgeist and life in general affected people. One of his first important articles in this respect was in the book Metropolis 1890-1940 (edited by his friend Anthony Sutcliffe and published in 1984) where Peter wrote two important chapters, for which I helped him with the research. Peter had always written books, one of his bestsellers was Urban and regional planning, first published in 1975. Writing about planning was bread and butter for him but his real interest was divided between writing historical books, such as Cities of Tomorrow (1988) and Cities in Civilization (1998), and books about cities, world cities, the development within cities and their future, a topic which he never got tired of writing about.

 

The last message I got from him was on the 20 June. He apologised that we had missed each other with the words “Life at 82 has too many time-consuming hospital visits, which I suppose are better than the alternative.”