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Emrys Jones, who died on 30 August 2006 at the age of 86, was a pioneer social and urban geographer, whose classic work on Belfast and later books firmly established social geography in the UK.
Born and schooled in Aberdare, in the Welsh valleys, Emrys graduated from the Department of Geography and Anthropology, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1941 with a first-class honours degree. (He was taught by, among others, C B Fawcett and R E Dickinson, members of the staff of the Department of Geography at University College London which had been evacuated to Aberystwyth.) As a pacifist, he then served as an ambulance driver and hospital orderly before returning to Aberystwyth in 1943, obtaining an MSc in 1945 and a PhD two years later. In 1947 he was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship at University College London, but was not later promoted to a permanent lectureship: the head of department - C B Fawcett - queried his commitment to geography because he had taken up a Rockefeller Scholarship in Social Science at various US universities in 1948-9, including Cornell, Chicago, Syracuse and the Bureau of Advanced Social Studies at Columbia University. (Emrys later recorded that his first IBG Conference paper, in 1951, on 'An aspect of the human ecology of a North American city (Utica)' was introduced by A G Ogilvie as 'a paper in sociology'.) So in 1950 he moved to a lectureship at Queen's University Belfast, and was promoted to senior lecturer in 1958. In that year, however, his former UCL colleague, R O Buchanan, encouraged him to move to the London School of Economics as Reader in Social Geography. He took up the post in January 1959 and spent the remainder of his career there, being promoted to a chair in 1961 and retiring (formally) in 1984.
Reflecting the main thrust of work at Aberystwyth then,...