A new chapter

So this has been a very big week. Yep AGI’s Geocom23 (my last one on Council after 8 years) was a roaring success but that’s only part of the story. In a week of farewell’s and celebrations yesterday was also my last day at Arup.

It seems it was only the other day to walking through the door of not just another built and natural environment consulting practice seemed like a happy bookending to that day in 1989 walking through Scott Wilson’s doors in Basingstoke. Arup was esteemed then and remains so today and rightly so. It’s been a blast, made more so by Arupians all around.

Bearing witness to and having the privilege to help inform in some modest way the shifts, the transformation if you will, necessary to navigate and leverage the changes wrought and opportunities offered by the pace and scale of change that has come with the digital revolution, is something of a constant over the intervening period.

Fortune and timing plays a part of course. 40 years ago the contrast between having to understand Dougie Mason at UCL - subtend anyone? - and the revelations of the late Tony Allan at the seemingly out of place “Introduction to Remote Sensing” course at SOAS of all places portended the direction of travel. Here was Landsat TM, there were plane tables, alidades and tellurometers. That that should lead from hard copy imagery interpretation in Somalia to today’s near real time monitoring of infrastructure or emissions and to augmented reality and spatial computing is something of a story arc in itself.

Suffice to say it’s a journey that’s by no means over……watch this space, or reach out……