Professor Peter Haggett (1933–2025)

Those words are found in the introduction to Diffusing Geography: Essays for Peter Haggett, a book published in celebration of his life and academic achievements as he neared ‘retirement’. Three decades later, they stand well as the opening to this shorter but equally heartfelt tribute to Professor Peter Haggett (CBE, FBA), following his death on 9 February 2025, at the age of 92. We are saddened by the loss but share the smiles and gratitude. Over a 70-year career, Peter's impact on geography, and the study of it, was immense. As Flowerdew (2004, p.156) writes, ‘the term “quantitative revolution” … does not do justice to the changes that Haggett and his colleagues tried to bring about (and largely succeeded) in the way geography was studied’, often still is, and is being rediscovered today in areas of geographic data science.

Peter was born on 24 January 1933 in Pawlett, rural Somerset, with the Quantock Hills to the West, and the Mendip Hills to the East. Much of his life was lived within the shadows of the same. In later years, he authored The Quantocks: Biography of an English Region (Haggett, 2012), with his daughter, Jackie, as photographer—the third of four children from his long and happy marriage with ‘the Homerton College girl with the sparkling eyes [Brenda]’ (Haggett, 1990, p. xv).

Injured playing rugby at school and encased in a plaster cast, Peter kept up his studies, reading about the Geomorphology of New Zealand (Cotton, 1942). Later, as a geography undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, the first book that Peter bought was Richard Hartshorne's The Nature of Geography (1939). He sold it, soon after, for further reading on geomorphology (he was low on funds and there were no relevant examination questions about the Hartshorne book) but, interest piqued, subsequently bought another copy (Haggett, 1990).

In 1966, after spells at UCL and back at Cambridge, Peter joined the (then) Department of Geography at the University of Bristol. Aged just 33, he was only its second established chair. He never really left. Peter ‘retired’ from the Department in 1998 but went (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 kept in touch with the (now) School of Geographical Sciences throughout—in person, by e-mail and by handwritten letters. He was a Head of Department, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and, for a year in the mid-1980s, the University's Acting Vice Chancellor in a difficult period for university funding. Plus ça change…

That long service to Bristol is paralleled by equal success in the discipline that he ‘most succinctly defined as “the study of the Earth's surface as the space within which human populations live”’ (Haggett, 1990, p. 8). 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, including the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography Anders Retzin Gold Medal. An earlier recipient of that award was Torsten Hägerstrand, a friend and source of inspiration to Peter. By alphabetical coincidence, but fittingly, Hägerstrand appears one chapter prior to Haggett in the first edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place (Hubbard et al., 2004).

It was in Cambridge, and through its wider geographical connections, that Peter became a part of the ‘space cadets’, forming a spatial network of various degrees of movement with other institutions in North America and the UK (see Figure 7.6 of Haggett, op. cit.). He, and they, are indelibly associated with spatial science and the efforts to kickstart, or in Peter's terminology, ‘diffuse’ a ‘quantitative revolution’ in the Anglo-American geography of the 1960s and 1970s. The diffusion was into university departments, and into schools too. A key channel was the symposia that Richard Chorley and Peter organised for teachers at Madingley Hall, at the invitation of the University of Cambridge's Extra-Mural Board (Johnston, 2019). The resulting books, Frontiers in Geographical Teaching (Chorley & Haggett, 1965) and Models in Geography (Chorley & Haggett, 1967), helped shape both secondary and tertiary-level curricula. Peter was, for a brief period, Chief Examiner of the Oxford and Cambridge A-level Geography Board (Wexford, 1989).

Like Hartshorne, Peter was interested in setting out what geography is as a discipline and what binds it together. He did so in in books including Geography: A Modern Synthesis (Haggett, 1972), and Geography: A Global Synthesis (Haggett, 2001). The repeated use of synthesis in those titles contrasts with a criticism of the quantitative revolutionaries for being too dismissive of the geographic traditions of regional synthesis in their pursuit of a more systematic and ‘scientific’ geography. Yet, Peter was appointed to Bristol as Professor of Urban and Regional Geography. His CBE was awarded for services to the same. He undertook his own regionally based studies (in the Pacific Basin, for example) but was aware, from very early on, of the perils of generalisation across spatial scales: ‘There are few sins in which geographers indulge with more relish than generalizing our field findings at a local level over the whole of an adjacent region’ (Haggett, 1964, p. 365); the mathematical methods of which, Peter was told, brought geography into disrepute (Chorley, 1995).

A synthesis that particularly interested Peter was that which might be established between physical and human geography. He studied and wrote at the interface between physical and social systems; and, although the interface—presumably influenced by those earlier readings in geomorphology—was driven by scientific framings, Peter recognised that geography is neither wholly a science nor a social science (and neither is it arts nor humanities): it is all of those, simultaneously, which means it faces an existential challenge when boxed into one faculty at the expense of receiving from and contributing to the intellectual terrain of others (Haggett, 1990).

It also means that geography draws widely (Peter suggests promiscuously) from other disciplines. This is intellectually open-minded, but raises the question of what is uniquely geography, other than, perhaps, the willingness to synthesise across subjects to better understand the distinctiveness of and comparisons between places, à la regional geography. Spatial science sought an answer to this ‘what is geography?’ question through mathematically imbued formalisations of spatial thinking: searching for ‘rules’ (or, at least, regularities) in spatial organisation and behaviour; establishing precepts (or, at least, guiding concepts) for their analysis (for example, scale, flows, networks, hierarchies, surfaces); the belief in the existence (or, at least, possibility) of a systematic and spatially organised approach to geographic study, and so forth.

Algebra, economic ideas, and analogies to physical laws and processes underpinned spatial science, as did emerging methods of computational statistics (notably the ability to manipulate and invert data matrices). But, in Peter's thinking, so too did cartography and maps. Peter's semi-autobiographical book, The Geographer's Art (not science, perhaps an indirect reply to Hart, 1982), describes geography as ‘the art of the mappable’. Maps emphasise location. Maps illustrate land and people relationships. Maps are scale dependent. Maps reveal patterns of geographic clustering and variation that can be explored using spatial statistics. (At the back of The Geographer's Art, Peter includes Cliff and Ord (1973) in a list of books that he encourages students to read.) Peter was working on a second edition of The Geographer's Art in the years prior to his death. With the generosity of his family, his progress on it has been deposited in Bristol's Special Collections.

Looked at through contemporary eyes, the search for geographic order—and the ordering of disciplinary geography—is a project that, in human geography, placed 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. An alternative but not competing perspective is to admire the scope of Peter's (and his contemporaries’) work. The scholarship is magnificent and frequently as breathtaking as the finest vistas of the Quantocks. It seeks and is grounded in geographical theories and explanations for geographically situated and geographically variable phenomena that are generated by geographical processes. Regardless of any shortcomings viewed in the modes of theorisation and the methods of explanation, the level of geographic ambition should be appreciated.

Historic context is of relevance, of course: the development of spatial science cannot be divorced from post-WWII reconstruction, the increased role of the (welfare) state, Keynesian economics, a greater faith in planning and in ‘predict and provide’, or from Harold Wilson's ‘white heat of technology’. But, if geographers today are comfortable with the tautology that geography is what geographers do (Bird, 1973), less constrained by some overarching and systematic framework in which to place their studies, then, in the UK especially, they owe a debt of gratitude to Peter: such freedoms arise because Peter (and others) worked so successfully to embed a respected (and respectable) geography into schools and universities. Quite how respectable geography should continue to be is a different matter.

As the wave of the quantitative revolution subsided, Peter's career increasingly became associated with medical geography and spatial epidemiology (Haggett, 2000). It is not hard to see the appeal: diseases diffuse in ways that involve human–environment interactions and, in their modelling, employ the aforementioned geographic concepts of nodes, flows, hierarchies, and the like. Peter acted as a consultant to many scientific and medical bodies, including the World Health Organization (Flowerdew, 2004). It is a shame that there was not greater opportunity for him to apply his expertise to public and scientific understandings of the COVID-19 pandemic, although the Preface to Smallman-Raynor et al. (2022) incorporates some thoughts.