1963-7: Haggett and Chorley and Madingley

In the sixties, there was a revival of quantitative geography, and the use of statistical models to help explain some geographical patterns and processes.

Peter Haggett was one of the lead lecturers in this movement, but people who were associated with the GA were also there too.

Madingley Conferences took place at this time, convened and organised by Haggett and Richard Chorley. They ran between 1963-7 and spawned several influential textbooks.



At the Geography Teacher Educators's conference in 2010, I had the privilege of speaking to the late Rex Walford (of which many more posts to come) after he did a talk on his memories of attending these conferences.
He had brought some of his memorabilia to the event and it was fascinating to see those original documents from those conferences that he had brought along.

Image from University of Cambridge Alumnus magazine (see source below)

Walford is quoted in Ivor Goodson's book talking about this time:

The Madingley Lectures proved a watershed in the emergence of the subject. Two years before, E.E. Gilbert - in an article on 'The Idea of the Region' - had stated that he regarded new geography in the universities as an 'esoteric cult'. After Madingley, this was no longer the case, as a college lecturer who was secretary of his local Geographical Association recalled: 'After Madingley my ideas were turned upside down... That's where the turn around in thinking in geography really started'. But as Walford later noted, Madingley was 'heady to some, undrinkable brew to others'. Following the second Madingley Conference in 1968, Chorley and Haggett sought to consolidate the changes they were advocating by a new book entitled Models in Geography. By this time opinions were becoming progressively polarized about the 'new geography'. Slaymaker wrote in support of the book:

In retrospect, a turning point in the development of geographical methodology in Britain. After the exploratory and mildly iconoclastic contents of the first Madingley lectures, recorded in Frontiers in Geographical Teaching, a more substantial statement of the methodological basis and aims of the so-called 'new geography' was required... with the publication of this book [it is demonstrated that] the traditional classificatory paradigm is inadequate and that in the context of the 'new geography' an irreversible step has been taken to push us back into the mainstream of scientific activity by process of model building. 

Neville Grenyer wrote about this time for the GA in 1972.

The Madingley Seminars were held between 1964 and 1967, following first lectures in 1963. 'Frontiers in Geographical Teaching' captured the atmosphere of the seminars. 'Trends in Geography' by Cooke and Johnson also came out of these events.

It also inspired my PGCE tutor Vincent Tidswell, who will appear later in the blog in his work.

Here's Chorley in an early interview.



More to come on this in future posts.

References
Wikipedia page for Peter Haggett:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Haggett

Madingley Conferences:
https://www.ivorgoodson.com/becoming-a-school-subject?p=12 - and other pages near this

Grenyer, N: "An introduction to Recent developments in Geography teaching: an annotated
bibliography" (Geography, Vol 57, No. 4, November 1972)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40567919

https://www.geography.org.uk/Journal-Issue/ea4a0ee3-5175-48c2-a8ae-1789df0ffec7 - Peter Haggett

References: Rex Walford's book on School Geography.

Image: Madingley Hall - shared under CC license by Alan Parkinson (2010)