My wife, son, daughter and I are based in Melbourne where I use my experience as a landscape architect to facilitate solutions to the sustainable settlement of this wonderful planet.
Born in 1954, I was brought up in Denton in Manchester's industrial east. Dad came home late with the Daily Mirror, so the more accessible, home-delivered Manchester Evening News shaped my young world. I knew of the "Manchester" Guardian more as a civic institution than as a newspaper – Isabella Scott, local resident, benefactor and mother of Guardian editor CP Scott had built my primary school and a copy of the paper lay in its foundation stone.
The social and environmental context of the world's first industrial city, the first oil shock and the 1972 book The Limits to Growth led me to tertiary studies in geology, geography and landscape architecture, and to a lifelong interest in cycling.
My relationship with the Weekly firmed when working in Hong Kong during times of new world order – Falklands, Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Tripoli, Chernobyl and the end of the Iran/Iraq war (with a perceptive Guardian opinion on Saddam Hussein, saying something like: "beware this man, we have not heard the last of him"). Expanded reporting on Africa and South America now reminds us of world orders to come.
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