My father-in-law, Geoff Fordham, who has died aged 73 after a spinal operation, was a respected figure in the field of urban regeneration and neighbourhood renewal. His childhood inspired his career.
Born in impoverished, postwar Shepherd’s Bush, west London, he lived in a two-room flat with his mother, Sibyl McCreeth, a clerk at J Lyon’s, Aunt Doll, Uncle Fred and their grownup children, Dot, Barbara and Bob. Geoff’s father, George Fordham, was a colleague of his mother’s at Lyon’s, but left when Geoff was a baby, and died when he was three.
As a newborn, Geoff wore clothes donated to poor people by the royal family after the birth of Prince Charles. An early memory was of his aunt teaching him to read with plastic letters in a cramped scullery.
He enjoyed learning, becoming head boy of St Stephen’s Church of England primary school in 1959, then winning a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital boarding school, Horsham, West Sussex, the following year. His time there exposed him to privilege and problems of class, fuelling his rebellious personality and leftwing politics.
He studied comparative government and Russian from 1967 at Essex University, then a hotbed of radicalism. Despite living on a rickety houseboat in Wivenhoe that eventually sank, he earned a first-class degree in 1971.
In 1973 he married Lillian Stone and began working for the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs union a year later, working closely with Clive Jenkins. His son, Daniel, my husband, was born in 1976, and his daughter, Hannah, in 1979.
He worked as a consultant on early regeneration projects for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government such as the Inner Cities Task Force Initiative and City Challenge, then developed and evaluated projects and strategies for government, councils, agencies and charities to tackle social inclusion, housing, homelessness, estates renewal and access to employment. After his separation from Lillian in 1987, the following year he met Rachael Knight on task force work. They married in 1990, founding GFA Consulting together a year later.
Working from the Upper Lee Valley to Uzbekistan over the next 20 years, Geoff became a professor in neighbourhood renewal at what is now Birkbeck, University of London, and a lead evaluator on Labour’s New Deal for Communities programme. He became “sort of retired” in 2010.
Remaining one of life’s doers, he led a successful community energy and sustainability project, gained an online MA in history from Edinburgh University, and secured funds for the Wellington Orbit community cinema, near his home in Ketley Bank, Telford, where he had moved in 2017. He also curated film nights there, and was a talented artist and cartoonist, setting up the Subversive Inappropriate Cartoons blog in 2012.
He loved drawing with his grandchildren, Iris, Evan and Ada, often speaking about how amazed his mother would have been by how different their young lives were to his.
He is survived by Rachael, his children and grandchildren.
