My friend David Manton Ellis, who has died aged 79, taught architecture in Manchester and later worked as a consultant geomancer, providing architectural and landscape businesses with spiritual insights into the places they were working on, including through the arts of meditation and dowsing.
David was born in Marsden in West Yorkshire to Herbert Ellis, who worked as a “twister-in” at various textile mills, and his wife, Barbara (nee Lowell), a corsetier. After Royds Hall grammar school in Huddersfield he studied architecture to diploma level at Huddersfield School of Art, began teaching interior design part-time there, and then in 1970 took up a full-time post as a lecturer at the School of Architecture at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University), teaching design, settlement studies, conservation and urban design. He paid particular attention to encouraging his students to show spiritual and emotional sensitivity to the landscape, a concept he would take into his own architectural advisory work in later years.
From 1979 David became part of the Manchester Community Architecture Group, set up by staff at the school, which gave advice on community projects in the Pennines and was eventually renamed the Design Co-op. He was also a key figure in the establishment of Pennine Heritage, a social enterprise devoted to the promotion of the social, physical and cultural history of the Pennines. He was for some time a regular contributor to Pennine Magazine, which attracted a cult readership with its use of distinctive monochrome photographs that were consistent with the gritty character of the industrial South Pennines.
David continued as a lecturer at Manchester until 2005, when he left to set up a geomancy consultancy, Earthwise, with his partner, Melanie Thomas. Among projects on which they were involved were the rebuilding and design of the Amavarati Buddhist monastery in Hampshire and work on the Church and Friary of St Francis in Manchester.
David was also part of a project commissioned by the London borough of Westminster to study, celebrate and reinterpret two hidden rivers in central London, the Tyburn and the Westbourne, identifying leylines and spiritual links that made sense of some previously unexplained connections between various sites and institutions. His final piece of work was a project he called City of Light, a study of the sacred geometry of Manchester.
David married Susan Bennett in 1969 and, after their divorce in 2011 following a lengthy separation, he lived in Glossop with Melanie. She survives him, as do five children from his marriage, Ruth, Rachel, Nathan, Mary and Martha, and four grandchildren.
