Leisure and the environment [antikvár]

FOREWORD: J.A. PATMOREROBERT W STEELI should have been embarrassed had I been asked by the Editor of this volume to contribute a chapter to a volume on Leisure and the Environment; but 1 am honoured to be invited to write a Foreword to this collection of essays that is a tribute to the work and influence of Emeritus Professor J. Allan Patmore.Allan and I have known one another for more than a third of a century in fact for thirty-six years. Allan, indeed, has been aware of my existence for even longer, since he attended (so he tells me) some of my lectures in the School of Geography in the University of Oxford where I was a Lecturer when he was reading the Honours School of Geography as an undergraduate at Pembroke College between 1949 and 1952.When I left Oxford to become the John Rankin Professor of Geography in the University of Liverpool in 1957,1 found Allan as one of the youngest members of the staff in the Department of Geography, and we were friends and colleagues until he left to become Professor of Geography in the University of Hull in 1973. He was, characteristically, enthusiastic, willing and innovative, and as always very hard-working. He was devoted to the teaching of his subject and outstanding in his relationships with our students. He and I shared, in particular, a strong belief in human geography and in its application to the problems of society. In the fifties and sixties, the specialism that marks geography today had not yet developed, and most geographers understood what their colleagues were doing and teaching. We worked particularly closely in the running of residential week-end field courses for first-year students, generally in North Wales or in the Yorkshire Dales where Allan drew on his considerable knowledge of that area from his home life in Wetherby and his school days at the Grammar School, Harrogate. From those experiences in Allans life there emerged both his Oxford B.Litt. thesis on Harrogate and Knaresborough (1959) and An Atlas of Harrogate, published by the Corporation of Harrogate in 1963.It may seem strange to write in 1992 that, three decades ago, human geography was having to fight for recognition as a social science. The Heyworth Report on Social Studies, published in 1965, had been mainly concerned with the traditional social scienceseconomics, political science, sociology,