Professor Peter Haggett (CBE, FBA) was a scholar in the best sense of the word. Reviews of his work by the people who knew him invariably talk of a kind and delightful man. Our memories, as colleagues and former students, are the same. His unassuming manner, and a life mainly lived within the quiet shadows of the Quantocks and Mendips, belie the extraordinary impact that he and others who met at Cambridge University had on the discipline from the mid-1960s onwards. It was also at Cambridge that he met, in his words, “the Homerton College girl with the sparkling eyes” – his wife-to-be, Brenda. It was a long and happy marriage.

Peter was, in 1966, the twenty-third person ever to be appointed to the then Department of Geography at Bristol, and only its second professorial chair. He was 33. He never left. In principle he ‘retired’ from the department in 1998, but in reality he continued (literally) up the road as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies, remaining a Senior Research Fellow of the University as of last year. He was a Head of Department (1966–75), Dean of Faculty (1975–80) and, in the mid-1980s, the person whom the University trusted as the safest possible pair of hands as Acting Vice-Chancellor for a bridging period between Sir Alec Merrison and Sir John Kingman – or, as Peter described them, an outgoing and incoming knight. The VC role interrupted his field studies in Fiji and the completion of a semi-autobiographical manuscript that would become The Geographer’s Art (published in 1990). In it, he writes of the period: “these were difficult days for universities in Britain, with heavy cuts in funding from the government body to cope with.” On that we shall say no more.

For current Geography undergraduates, Peter’s name is familiar by its association with the Haggett Laboratory, a large room of computer terminals within what is now the School of Geographical Sciences. Here, many generations of students have been taught quantitative geography in its various guises. That association is, of course, deliberate. It is a tribute to Peter’s substantial contributions, in Bristol and beyond, to research and teaching. However, his intellectual contribution is misunderstood if it is viewed only in terms of numbers, statistics, formulae, or data. There was much greater geographic intent and impact.

From a distance of more than 50 years, it is hard to appreciate quite how disruptive – to use a modern term – the spatial science that Peter helped diffuse across the discipline was to contemporaneous practices of regional geography. With mathematically imbued formalisations of spatial thinking, Peter and his peers searched for ‘rules’ (or regularities) in spatial organisation and behaviour, established precepts (or guiding concepts) for their analysis (for example, scale, flows, networks, hierarchies, surfaces), and believed in the existence (or possibility) of a systematic and spatially organised approach to geographic study. This ‘new geography’, which Peter pioneered, represented a clear shift in how to study geography and, by extension, to be a geographer.

Looked at through critical eyes, that search for geographic order, and the ordering of disciplinary geography that accompanied it, may be viewed as placing too great an emphasis on mathematical logic and economic rationality, and too little on (Marxian) critiques of capitalist re-/production, or on developing studies that replace grand theories of explanation with an emphasis on subjectivities, ‘irrationalities’, contingencies, partialities, inconsistencies and differences, and their spatial realisations and expressions. An alternative but not competing perspective is to admire the ambition in Peter’s (and others’) work. It seeks, and is grounded, in geographical theories and explanations for geographically situated and geographically variable phenomena that are generated by geographical processes.

The intellectual endeavour and depth of scholarship in books such as Locational Analysis in Human Geography (Haggett, 1965) are as breathtaking as the Quantocks’ finest vistas. Regardless of how the modes of theorisation and explanation are viewed, the ambition is to be admired. It helped embed a respected (and respectable) geography into the curricula of school and university geography that was, at the risk of caricature, more than the rote learning of national capitals, the length of rivers, or the student’s guide to Britain’s former colonies. Today, spatial science continues to challenge naïve forms of quantification that do not consider the importance of geographical context, interaction and variation. Infusing spatial realism into modelling remains a necessity for machine learning and AI.

What spatial science never resolved, though, is that geography is not reducible either to a science or to scientific approaches. It is, by nature (and nurture), faculty-crossing and interdisciplinary – hence it can be placed with the humanities in secondary schools, but with the social or natural sciences in universities. It sounds imperious, but geography is the study of how and where physical, socio-economic and cultural processes, products and formations come together with other geographically situated (co-)occurrences. Peter was, by all accounts, characteristically respectful of other disciplinary approaches after the quantitative wave in human geography receded. He continued his own, highly respected pursuits in medical geography and spatial epidemiology, working with various advisory and medical bodies, including the World Health Organization. In 1986 he received the Patron’s Gold Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, the highest level of its awards. In 1991 he was awarded the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud (the ‘Nobel Prize’ of Geography). His CBE came two years later, followed by other awards and recognitions.

Peter writes in The Geographer’s Art that “the study of geography at university will give scientific insight, provide skills [and give] a philosophical framework for environmental and global problems. But I think its most precious gift is none of these. Geographical skills can enrich all the remaining years of one's life so that what is seen is understood and appreciated.”

In this understanding and in so many others, he was a model geographer, whose contributions to this School, this discipline and this University were immense and long lasting. He will be greatly missed.

Richard Harris
Tony Hoare
Kelvyn Jones
David Richards
John Wylie