Walter Menzies obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/walter-menzies-obituary

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My friend Walter Menzies, who has died of a brain tumour aged 69, made a profound contribution to the cause of sustainable development, driven by his fascination with people and places. He was a twinkly-eyed, mischievous, inspiring and determined doer. “Sustainable development is the only credible way of organising our environment, economy and society,” he stated uncompromisingly in a collection of 30 years of his writings.

He and I met when I was reporting for the Guardian in the north and he was chief executive of the Mersey Basin Campaign, a pioneering project set up by Michael Heseltine after the 1981 Toxteth riots. Heseltine wanted the river cleaned up. The campaign was so successful that fishermen caught cod across the river from Liverpool’s Pier Head and seals were seen lazing on sandbanks at Warrington.

Walter (always known as Stuart, his middle name, in Scotland) was born in Edinburgh to Winifred (nee Marshall), a civil servant, and Adam Menzies, a bank manager, but his family’s roots were in Aberfeldy, the Perthshire town to which he regularly returned for holidays as a child and where he lived with an aunt after both parents died when he was a teenager.

He attended Perth Academy and then studied architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. He moved to London to work with the Greater London council from 1970-1971 and then went into practice with Michel and Partners (1974-1976). He developed a passion for community-led development while working on a scheme to improve Victorian terraces in Eastleigh in Hampshire. There he met Ketta Carver, an architecture student; they moved to Oxford, where in 1978 Walter gained an MA in urban design at Oxford Brookes University.

Then it was on to Liverpool, where they married in 1978. Walter took a job with a local housing association, Merseyside Improved Houses, where he ran a special projects department, known as “Wally’s Wheezes”.

In 1983, he was the first director of Groundwork Trust Macclesfield, part of a new movement with a radical-for-the-time mission to make things happen through partnership, working across the public, private and voluntary sectors. He was later involved in setting up Groundwork Trusts all over the country.

He became the first chief executive of Sustainability Northwest and initiated the UK’s first regional climate change assessment. Between 2000 and 2005, he was one of the first commissioners in the Labour government’s Sustainable Development Commission.

Never known to run, Walter was a staunch urbanist whose great pleasure was to wander round cities with a camera, and he took a child-like joy in riding in the front seat on the top deck of a London bus.

Walter was working as a sustainability consultant when he fell ill; he was also on the board of the Land Trust, was chair of the Manchester and Pennine Canal and River Trust, and was a professor in the department of civic design in the school of environmental sciences at Liverpool University.