My husband, Robert Marshall, who has died aged 80, was one of the first members of the department of town and regional planning at the University of Sheffield, where he stayed for nearly 40 years. In the late 1970s he designed and led the influential interdisciplinary urban studies degree there.
Born in Downham, near Bromley, which was then in Kent, to Robert Marshall, a Covent Garden porter, and his wife, Ann (nee Mahoney), Robert grew up with an elder sister, Joan, and his aunt Eileen, Ann’s much younger sister whom she raised as her own. Robert went to Brockley county grammar school, then Fitzwilliam college, Cambridge, to study geography.
After graduating in 1960, he returned to London with a future in mind as a town planner, and so, while working for London County Council, took evening classes at Regent Street Polytechnic, now the University of Westminster.
In 1962 he took a job as a planner at the City Architect’s Office in Oxford. After a couple of years there he was given a project to head up known as The Land Use Survey. This was a study of every building within the boundaries of Oxford City, which would create a reference base upon which planners could draw instantly when considering applications. I had taken a summer holiday job working on the study, where we met, and we married in 1967.
The previous year, Robert had been appointed as a lecturer in planning at Sheffield University, and despite thinking he would only stay there a year, he remained in the department until his retirement in 2004. His urban studies course was radical at the time, being truly interdisciplinary and also attracting students from unconventional educational backgrounds. While at Sheffield he was also valued for his administrative and leadership qualities, holding the roles of head of department, sub-dean, deputy dean and dean of the faculty of architectural studies.
In his own work, Robert was most interested in the ethical. Long in the creating was a work on the nature of utopias. It was never completed, put on the “back-burner”, while he devoted himself to the needs of his students, his door always open. It was they to whom he devoted his career.
A modest and essentially shy man, in retirement Robert developed a passion for gardening, also tending an allotment. He also regularly attended meetings of the Sheffield Conservation Advisory Group, a voluntary body that takes a wider look at planning applications.
Robert is survived by me, by our daughter, Victoria, and seven grandchildren, and by Joan.
