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About |
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| Name | Brian Turnbull Robson, Professor |
| Date of Birth | February 23rd, 1939 |
| Date of Death | June 5th, 2020 |
| Home Town | Newcastle upon Tyne, England, GB |
| Other City | Manchester, England, GB |
| Favourite Saying | ??? Any ideas |
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Milestones |
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| 1977 - 2020 | Professor of Geography, University of Manchester | ||
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published a tribute .
+I have learnt of Brian's death relatively recently and have been greatly moved by all the tributes about Brian and Glenna that have been displayed. You have all captured his personality and humour so well I have no further tales or things to add except to add our love for him and his warmth and humour.
I am not a geographer but a biochemist!
I was at St.Catharines college with him (1958-1964) and we really got to know each other during our struggles with our PhD. He was a great support during those times and we used to discuss all our problems daily after a frantic squash game(he usually won!).I lost touch with him as in our careers led us in different directions but my wife and I were delighted to meet him again and Glenna too in 2016 at a reunion and also in a Alnwick bookshop looking at a map!
His memory still inspires me in my thinking and living and this shows how widely his personal influence still is if a retired biochemist can be moved to think more widely and deeply and with love.
I miss him very much, Thank you for reading this
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published a tribute .
My first meeting with Brian was in Sheffield, during a very nice dinner at Ranmoor hosted by one of the Whitehall departments after a project meeting of three universities. I was a researcher in CURDS at the time and hardly would I know that I would be working with Brian in the later years of my career. Another interesting occasion much later was our work on the Index of Multiple Deprivation for the London Mayor (Ken Livingstone), Brian jokingly complained how expensive it was to take me to meetings as he was by then on pensioner fares. Brian was always very kind and gave me lifts home from various meeting places to Didsbury. In these journeys, he chatted about nice restaurants, lovely holidays in Majorca, the success of his stepsons, and of course, a lot of praise of Glenna. Rather than focussing on his academic successes, Brian was actually a very proud family man striking a successful work-life balance. I succeeded to the CUPS Directorship after Brian’s so-called retirement. To me, he never actually retired, as he came to work everyday until his health conditions did not allow this. Even when he had a hip replacement operation, Kitty Lymperopoulou still took maps and analysis to show him at his home. He was very supportive of CUPS and happily helped out whenever we needed him for events and chairing meetings. He even answered my emails when he was in hospital having check-ups and still joked about his condition. There were moments when difficult decisions had to be made about CUPS and his advice was always “Don’t do it, if it is not fun any more” which captured the spirit of CUPS in which people gathered to work on research that they valued and enjoyed! We will sadly miss Brian’s wit and wisdom, but his influence will shine on.
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published a tribute .
I had the good fortune of working with Brian in the early stages of my career. He guided me through some work for Barnardos on developing a framework for evaluating anti-poverty work. He also kindly went out of his way to drive me back home to Oldham after a very late finish one evening after delivering a presentation to the Manchester Statistical Society. Successful academics are always busy people, but Brian was always very generous with his time to encourage a junior colleague. I was fortunate to have known him, and even more fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with him. Perhaps not Brian's best known work, but 'A Pleasant Pain' (his contribution to Recollections of a Revolution) remains one of my favourite reads!
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published a tribute .
I was saddened by Brian’s passing. He was a great man, great values and great scholar. I avidly read his first two books when I was a final year undergraduate at Glasgow and was somewhat starstruck when I first met him in the late 70’s. Over quarter of a century, from time to time we worked together on projects and book chapters and it was always a pleasure. Aside from the insight there was always a wry, teasing sense of humour.
Brian was always helpful and he gave me a great deal of advice and support in negotiating ESRC committees and structures when I was developing the Centre for Housing Research and Urban Studies at Glasgow in the early 1980’s. He was a man of depth and broad perspective in his work and life.
With all my best wishes to Brian’s successors at Manchester. Keep up his great work.
Duncan
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published a tribute .
I first met Brian not long after I arrived as a lecturer in Planning and GIS in 2003 first working with him on the South Manchester baseline analysis for a regeneration framework report. One day having produced a map showing the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which he knew quite a bit about (!!), he asked if I could change the blue areas on the map to yellow. "You know we call it the sunshine belt around here." He was always a please to work with, had a mischievous glint in his eye and always injected just the right level of humour in to our meetings.
published a comment .
So sorry to hear of Brian's passing. An outstanding economic geographer with a keen desire to help those in need. His work on the Index of Multiple Deprivation was of fundamental importance in targeting regeneration activity. He gave so freely of his time to so many people and was always so helpful and insightful. Besides the insight he gave me when we met I enjoyed his great sense of humour. He will be sadly missed.
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published a tribute .
As chair of the Human Geography Committee during the Brian was a great influence on the work of its Designated Research Centre (CURDS) in Newcastle University. His wise counsel helped steer a way between academic work, policy and practice. For me personally he was both mentor and friend . As we both moved into managerial roles in our respective universities we shared experience on how the research could inform how universities could work with their cities to mutual benefit
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published a tribute .
Brian arrived at Cambridge while I was an undergraduate. He taught me Urban Geography in my final year and then supervised my PhD. At the time he was working on his book on 'Urban Growth' and I remember supervisions in his attic office in Downing Place, looking at and discussing the array of carefully plotted graphs scattered around the office, showing urban growth rates plotted against city size. I have never forgotten those graphs! Brian's supervision was light touch, encouraging curiosity, gently and wryly asking questions and offering encouragement, teaching by example, demonstrating how to do theoretically engaged and innovative historical research that spoke to contemporary issues. I am truly grateful to Brian for setting me on the right path as an urban historical geographer.
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published a tribute .
When I joined the University of Manchester in 1994 Brian Robson was extremely welcoming. He was already deeply committed to the project of rebalancing the economic geography of the English Regions and invited me to take part in the 'Transpennine' project. Working with the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds we explored the potential for improving East/West transport and economic links across the north of England. This later broadened out to explore a North European Trade Axis with research partners from the academy, business and government from Ireland to Germany. My own role was environmental assessment and latterly the eco-cultural landscape. A rebalancing of tourism along this axis, from north/south to east/west would make sense in a changing climate.
This all foreshadowed the government's Northern Powerhouse initiative and latterly the 'levelling-up' agenda. The recent establishment of a Transpennine forestry initiative will strengthen the 'green infrastructure' but it will take major investment in transport and communications to realise the full opportunity for the people of Northern England. That would be a fitting tribute to Brian and his vision for the regions.
Brian was an excellent research colleague - creating space and opportunity for others, building links across the disciplines and providing really effective leadership. He greatly assisted my own transition from practitioner to researcher on joining the University and for that I am immensely grateful.
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published a tribute .
Brian was one of the giants of urban studies when I took my first steps along the path he'd helped open up for us all in the late 1980s. As a young Research Associate at the short-lived Centre for Urban Studies at the University of Liverpool, I was lucky enough to work with Brian on a comprehensive evaluation of national urban policy that we were involved in winning as junior partners to CUPS, Brian's institutional legacy to the University of Manchester. He was in his element during the course of that study, leading us in the painting of big picture conclusions - as resonant now as they were then - on the basis of sound social science and a big, compassionate heart that never allowed the privileges he worked hard to achieve for himself cloud his judgement about the struggles faced by people who were less fortunate. Beyond the things that he is rightly celebrated for - his impeccable track record as an 'engaged' academic and the decades of loyal service he gave to the university and city of Manchester - I'll always remember Brian for his driest of imaginable wits. I have only dim memories of the substance of a second, less prestigious UK Government commission we Scousers won which ran into choppy waters when we were accused of lacking the expertise in economics that the sponsor suddenly decided was essential to its success. Who to call upon, in our moment of need? Brian, of course. No, he wasn't a trained economist, he reminded us, and would never pretend to be of that particular persuasion, but what we had to remember in dealing with civil servants, he insisted, was the importance of speaking loudly and slowly about the things we could be confident about, irrespective of the client's whims at any one point in time. Sure enough, Brian got the job as the guest 'economist' on our team and things went swimmingly until we reached the point at which our Government minders wanted to know where our conclusions were tending. Let's hear it, they said. Was it A, or was it B? As the less experienced of us fumbled for an answer, up piped the confident, mellifluous tones of Prof. Robson. 'You find us interestingly poised on that question', he said, loudly and slowly, before adding a few obfuscations that made it perfectly clear that we weren't going to be answering it. Not that day anyway. All done with a sure-footed charm that allowed no come-back on the part of our paymasters. Quintessential Brian. I've lost count of the times my work has been 'interestingly poised' ever since.
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published a comment .
Brian's book Urban Analysis on Sunderland's city structure was an inspiration to me in my formative postgraduate studies, as was Those Inner Cities two decades later when I was getting into policy-related research. But most of all I enjoyed working with Brian during his last few months alongside Mike Barke preparing his final book Newcastle upon Tyne: Mapping the City, mainly by email but once at his home ably assisted by Glenna. His treasure trove of maps was quite something to behold.
published a comment .
I first met Brian in 1972 when I was a Research Assistant at the University of Reading. We had both been invited to a meeting run by the SSRC, where it was and what it was about I cannot quite remember but they did hold meetings in Holborn somewhere and we sat in an ante-room waiting for the room to be vacated and the meeting to begin. Brian was then Editor of Area and I had briefly been in correspondence with him over my article ‘Entropy and Spatial Geometry’. I sort of knew it was Brian and was a little intimidated but we struck up a conversation and hit it off at once. A gentler person you could never wish to meet. By 1980 after I had moved to Cardiff, I found myself Chair of the SSRC Planning Committee and Brian was Chair of Geography. Both were to merge in 1982 to form the ESRC Environment and Planning Committee and I continued on the Committee that Brian so ably chaired. Intellectually, I think his book Urban Growth: An Approach is path breaking. No one has ever tried to put together a complete data base on the distribution of towns in England and Wales in the 19th century and his work there still awaits someone else to take up the mantle and extend the analysis. The study of towns prior to the modern age is as important if not more so than contemporary developments, and in a past world where data is sparse, the challenge that Brian took up was magnificent. Years later his 2010 Manchester: Mapping the City is equally significant.
published a comment .
I first met Brian relatively late in his career, knowing him by reputation from things of his I'd read while an undergraduate at Oxford. We were office neighbours in the Mansfield Cooper Building when I joined Manchester University in 2000. We immediately clicked. He had a wry sense of humour, a way with words, and a habit of making wise observations about all manner of issues. As the years went by, I came to see the huge levels of concern and effort that Brian put into the Centre for Urban Policy Studies. Later, I had the good fortune to research and write two commemorative pieces about him (one co-written with Iain Deas, both published last year). These pieces revealed just how impressive and inspiring Brian's long professional life had been. During the years I knew him, one would never have known just how accomplished he was - he rarely ever talked himself up or mentioned his many achievements. Instead, he kept on working, enthusiastically committing to new projects in and beyond Manchester. I regard Brian as a model post-war academic. He saw his job as a vocation, was humble, used his academic freedom to do important analytical and policy work, and sought to leave a legacy that was more about others than himself. His example will long remain inspiring. I think about him often and am extremely glad to have known Brian T. Robson.
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published a tribute .
Brian was a source of friendship, intellectual rigour, and inspiration - someone to add statistical and (in the true sense) academic clout to expose deep-seated social issues: appalling housing, inner-city decay, inequality and, of course, regional disparities in England. So it was over the years that this reporter sought Brian’s help on numerous occasions - commissioning him (and CUPS) as northern editor to analyse, say, the state of collapsing housing markets in the north west (full page in the then broadsheet Guardian) and, inevitably, the North-South divide (another page), Delightful company blessed with that essential ingredient: always delivering ahead of time. Great champion of Manchester and the north: calling, presciently, for a ‘council of the north’ to give its three regions added clout
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published a comment .
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