Professor Alice Mary Coleman (8th June 1923–2nd May 2023)

Abstract

Emerita Professor Alice Coleman, who was a member of the Geography Department, King’s College London, from 1948 until 1996, passed away on 2 May 2023, just short of her 100th birthday. Alice was awarded a first class undergraduate degree at Birkbeck in 1947 while working full time as a geography teacher in Kent. In the following year, she began her University of London MA at King’s College, graduating with a distinction. Her academic talent was noticed by Professor Sydney Wooldridge, who had been at Birkbeck but had joined the King’s Department, and she was appointed an assistant lecturer in 1948 and promoted to a lecturer in 1951. In 1987, Alice was appointed to a chair in Geography, the first woman in the Department to achieve that status. Apart from visiting lecturerships in North America and Japan, she remained in the Geography Department until her retirement in 1996. Devoted to her job, uncompromising in her standards, a loyal colleague, she was one of the most important geographers of her generation. When Alice joined the Geography Department at King’s she was the only qualified teacher on the staff. Her commitment to a geographical education is evident in some of her early papers on field work. In a paper published in 1954 in Geography, the Geography Association’s journal, Alice outlined a sample traverse in East Kent that could be used by teachers, and which she had completed by bike with her own sixth form students, including 23 suggested stops, complete with magnificent drawings and cross sections of the route [1]. This interest in field work – about which she published several more papers and which characterised her work throughout the rest of her career – was typical of her commitment to a fully rounded geography education that brought physical and human geography together. Throughout the 1950s she ran voluntary summer field trips to Europe, often repeating them two or three times and attracting students from many different universities. In 1 year alone, she recalled that she had been away on field trips for a total of 51 days. It was not until the Second Land Use Survey, which she directed, gathered pace in the early 1960s that she was forced to reduce the amount of time she spent on taking geography field trips. She always took a keen interest in her students, something which many alumni of the Joint School of Geography still remember with fondness to this day. Alice’s early academic interests focused on geomorphology but even then it was clear that she was also concerned with the implications of her work for planning and practical purposes. Her first published paper, on ‘selenomorphology’ looked skywards – towards understanding the shape of the lunar landscape – and was published in the Journal of Geology in 1952 [2]. At the time of the Apollo moon landings, it was quoted by NASA as one of the first papers to discuss in real scientific terms the origin of the morphology of the moon. This was soon followed by other papers on the cement industry around the Thames [3] and land reclamation in Kent [4] that hinted at her interests in linking academic research with the planning process. These interests later came to the fore in the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES 2023, VOL. 80, NO. 5, 1203–1206 https://doi.org/10.1080/00207233.2023.2228075