ABSTRACT
I first met Peter Hall in late 1968 in the Terrapin Buildings that housed the Geography Department in the University of Reading. I had journeyed to Reading to ‘interview’ for a job as a Research Assistant on a three year project that Peter had secured from the Centre for Environmental Studies, to join a team building urban land-use transport models. I was at the time a Studio Assistant in Manchester University’s Department of Town and Country Planning where I had taken my degree, stayed on to do an MA, being funded by helping to teach design studio. My job was ending but during my time at Manchester, I had re-skilled to the point where I could program computers, could read the simple mathematics of the quantitative geography of those years, and had cut my teeth on building such urban models for the North-East Lancashire and Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire sub-regions. Research Assistant sounded so much grander than Studio Assistant (which then as now implied cleaning up after students had thrown ink around, sweeping up the shavings from the incessant
sharpening of 6B pencils, and helping those who couldn’t draw draw – a thankless task).
