Chris Watson (1940 - 2019)
Dear Colleagues
Many of you will already heard that our colleague Chris Watson recently passed away.
The purpose of this post is to honour his contribution to the University of Birmingham and latterly to our Housing and Communities Research Network, to which he was perhaps the most regular attender. We all still remember the wonderful event on Healthy Housing which he put on with the Academic-Practitioner Network in May 2018.
Chris was a good man, and a marvellous colleague as so many of the tributes received this week acknowledge. The University of Birmingham is indeed fortunate to have employed such a true internationalist whose work on housing and urban renewal made such a difference in Birmingham and across the World, and built such a network of friends and followers! As one colleague put it, ‘It’s hard to think of a world without Chris’.
Here we present a eulogy, personal reflection and a list of tributes received. If you would like to add to the tributes please send your message to me (Professor David Mullins) and we will update the list in due course.
Personal tributes to Chris Watson [.pdf]
Chris Watson: A true internationalist influencing housing and urban renewal policy and practice.
Chris Watson was my longest-standing colleague at the University of Birmingham, to whom I owe so much. Chris had a distinguished career at the University, which he joined in 1972. He was Director of the world famous Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) (1987-93), the Japan Centre (1993-2002) and Director of International Affairs (1984-94). Chris was an outstanding academic with a keen awareness of the importance of engaging with policy and practice, particularly in the fields of urban renewal and social housing. He delivered professional development programmes with leading institutions in those fields in the UK and internationally, notably in Hong Kong, Korea and Japan. He co-authored several influential books including Housing Policy and the Housing System (with Alan Murie and Pat Niner, 1976) and Housing and the New Welfare State: perspectives from East Asia and Europe (with Alan Murie and Rick Groves, 2007).
Chris was a friend to many locally based housing associations during their rapid growth as a social movement to become mainstream housing providers, but he retained a critical detachment and recognised that ‘big is not always beautiful’. He chaired Mercian Housing Association and was a board member for over 20 years between 1984 and 2005. He worked closely with Birmingham City Council’s Urban Renewal Team in the 1980s and 90s, when it was a European front-runner in this field. He remained an advocate of urban renewal, recently reminding UK and European audiences of the adverse consequences for public health and social equality of not renewing our older housing stock.
Since ‘retirement’, Chris has continued to make a valued contribution to the Housing and Communities Research Group (HCRG), having a near perfect attendance at seminars; always first in line to ask a penetrating question; and a keen contributor to newsletters. In this period his influential publications included Renewing Europe’s Housing (with Richard Turkington, 2015), Good Housing: Better Health, 2016 and Delivering Healthy Housing, 2018 (both with colleagues in the Academic-Practitioner Partnership). This work-stream attracted interest from Parliamentary Select Committees and influenced the 2018 White Paper on Healthy Homes and Buildings. Chris led his colleagues from the Academic-Practitioner Partnership for HCRG’s best- attended seminar in May 2018 on Healthy Housing. Chris’ Honorary Post was extended in 2018 to enable him to ‘continue to work with colleagues in the development of the Housing and Communities Research Network’.
Chris has welcomed and mentored many overseas visitors to the University, especially from Japan and Korea. Visitors in the last five years included Professor K Y Lau (City University of Hong Kong); Ass. Professor Yoshinobu Kikuchi (Fukui University, Japan); Professor Man-Hee Han (former Vice-Minister in the Government of Korea and Dean of International School of Urban Sciences, University of Seoul); and Professor Koji Kanagawa, (University of Shizouka, Japan).
Chris was an enthusiastic member of the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR), attending annual conferences and coordination committee meetings, and winning friends across the continent with his understated diplomacy. Until 2018, he acted as a Coordinator of the Housing in Developing Countries Working Group. Colleagues from the Coordination Committee of ENHR and from almost every European country are also among those providing tributes.
Several themes recur in tributes. Chris was ‘A Gentleman, Kind, Friendly, Elegant, Understated and Unexpectedly Irreverent. He had a genuine interest in people and was great at putting people at ease. He was attentive to younger researchers. Many scholars benefited from his constructive suggestions for improvement, Diplomacy and Dinners! ‘
Personal Reflection
I concur with those themes, especially the dinners! If ever we had to entertain a large party in a Chinese restaurant, I would always invite Chris along as our diplomat, group facilitator and menu adviser! On many occasions, I had cause to appreciate his support, which was always attentive, gentle and wise. I will give a few examples.
In 1990, early in my time at the University, I got a job with the Housing Corporation in Exeter. Like Chris, I was keen to apply knowledge to policy and practice, and fancied living on Dartmoor! I will always be grateful to Chris for his attentive advice to apply for leave of absence from the University rather than resigning my post. When the inevitable corporate restructure came, I was able to return to CURS after two great years on Dartmoor! I would probably have remained with CURS until my retirement, had the University not made another restructure, closing CURS after almost 50 years in 2011.
In 2012, Chris’ wisdom again came to the fore when as an Honorary Senior Lecturer he provided gentle advice on how to build up a new Housing and Communities Research Group in Social Policy from scratch. He was genuinely interested in the group’s two core themes. The first, around the tensions of governance of a now large-scale housing association sector that he and colleagues had helped to build but that he had begun to see as a ‘monstrous hybrid’. The second, on the potential of community-led housing to tackle wicked issues such as empty homes.
In 2014, I remember, the much-travelled Chris visiting Hull for the first time to support HCRG’s event on ‘the best thing – self-help solutions to empty homes’. This event celebrated achievements of a £50 million national programme that had enabled 100 grass roots groups to repair and bring several thousand empty homes into use, supported by action research from HCRG. As ever, Chris showed genuine interest and recognised my enthusiasm for this programme. He also had the wisdom to say at the event that as wonderful as it was ‘street level regeneration’ could only paper-over cracks left by demise of comprehensive urban renewal programmes of the kind he’d advocated in Birmingham 30 years earlier. He also had the gentleness and diplomacy to do this in a way that still made our research seem worthwhile!
David Mullins, Emeritus Professor of Housing Policy, Housing and Communities Research Group. November 29th 2019.
HCRG Seminar May 10th 2018.
Delivering Healthy Homes
Chris Watson with Alan Murie and Stephen Battersby, Academic-Practitioner Partnership.