When you’ve known someone for a long time it’s hard to separate the person from their work. And in Doreen’s case it would be unfair too, because her influence extended beyond her writing to her way of being – as an academic, an activist and a person. From a working-class background, she grew up during the exceptional decades of growth and increasing equality that followed the Second World War. Like many others, she celebrated the end of deference; she showed that one could be excellent without being elitist, and profound without being pompous or obscure. There was nothing incongruous in laughing at a silly joke one moment (often a Pythonesque send-up of academia) and being completely serious the next; in fact this was the way to work and live. Round about 1989, Doreen and I and Open University colleague John Allen formed our own discussion group – “The Brighton Pier Social Theory Group” – that met several times in Brighton, and once in Copenhagen. The ingredients of the meetings were social and spatial theory, ontology, coffee and pastries, and irreverent laughter, combined in any order. While being with her could be fun, she could also be scarily intense, with a formidable ability to encapsulate the complex briefly and to zero in on the weakness of others’ ideas, so you often felt you needed to be on your toes when you were with her. She had an insatiable appetite for learning, for writing, for engaging in politics, and getting the most out of life. While her championing of the importance of space linked her firmly to geography, she was also a post-disciplinary thinker whose work defied identification with any single - ism, and she was exceptionally widely read. Whether the subject was space, politics, social theory, Marx, feminism, Bergson, geology, or bird watching – all were approached with her inimitable relish.

Her range of interests was wide, but she always strove to find connections, relations among things. Hence her overtures to physical geography (Massey 1999g). She used to carry a geology map of the UK with her in her travels so she could check out the underlying rocks wherever she was.