I grew up in the north of England and went to school in Bury where I took ‘A’ Levels in maths, physics and geography in the sixth form. After leaving school in the mid-1960s, I took an undergraduate degree in geography at Sheffield University and a Master’s degree in planning, at Liverpool University. I was clearly a product of the quantitative revolution in geography which also affected planning and, in particular, planning methodology. My background in maths was to prove very useful in picking up the latest analytical methods and I was extremely fortunate that in my first two jobs, working in local authority planning departments in the early 1970s, I had a marvellous opportunity to use the these methods in a practical context. The first two years of the geography degree at Sheffield were unremarkable and really quite dull. The final year, however, proved to be a turning point when a new professor was appointed, Stan Gregory. Gregory had made his name at Liverpool University as one of the leading lights in quantitative geography. His textbook on statistical methods had a major influence on British geography in the 1960s. I took full advantage of Gregory’s courses, including a Master’s-level module in multivariate statistics and what was surely a unique course on water resources development. I found this invaluable much later in my career when I began my involvement in the Mersey Basin Campaign, cleaning up North West England’s heavily-polluted rivers. I wanted a career in which I could use geography and, with this in mind, had begun to think of doing a Master’s degree in planning. It was Stan Gregory again who steered me to Liverpool where one of his former students Ian Masser, by now a planning academic, was committed to re-structuring the Master’s curriculum to include analytical planning techniques. Ian deserves great credit for making me aware of the Regional Science Association and introducing me to the burgeoning regional science literature. Reflecting this, my Master’s dissertation on zoning system design combined two areas of regional science: geodemographics and spatial interaction modelling. The early years of my professional career were spent in local government working in two local authority planning departments, Lancashire and Greater Manchester, in North West England. At the time large planning departments like these had a programme of applied research used to support strategic plan-making. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that large local authorities were far more active in planning research than most university planning schools. There was a genuine interest in fresh ideas that would advance the methods of plan-making. Despite being a new recruit and still in my early twenties, I was given a remarkable amount of freedom to work on a range of regional science methods and models, managing the projects myself. At Lancashire, for example, I had the opportunity in the early 1970s to develop and apply a Lowry model for the sub-regional plan of North East Lancashire. And, in the lead-up to a major local government reorganization in 1974, I had responsibility for carrying out two geodemographic classifications of small area census data for the new metropolitan authority, Greater Manchester Council, breaking new ground in planning practice. Soon afterwards, working as a transport planner, I led a project to develop and test the impact of long-term land-use scenarios upon the transport system of Greater Manchester using the SELNEC Model first developed by regional scientist Alan Wilson in the UK Government’s Mathematical Advisory Unit in the mid-1960s. I have never regretted the time I spent in local authorities and I benefited enormously from the excellent environment they gave in which to do good applied work. However, I gradually realized that my future career lay in universities and that I needed to make the transition sooner rather than later. The ideal opportunity arose when Masser moved to a chair at the University of Utrecht in 1975. I was fortunate enough to be offered the lectureship he vacated at Liverpool. Other recent appointments at Liverpool were Moss Madden and Peter Brown, both of whom had studied civil engineering before moving into planning and were therefore, like me, relatively numerate. Ian Masser, who had planted the regional science seed in all three of us, remained our mentor, in the absence of Liverpool-based research active senior colleagues. I developed a very productive working relationship with both of them, but on different topics. Moss and I shared an interest in the integrated forecasting of population and economic activity. Up to that point, strategic planners generally made separate population and employment forecasts which were unlikely to be consistent one with another. Our major contribution to solving this problem came in the design and construction of a series of regional extended input-output models, adding demographic variables to the well-known Leontief i