35 British geographers

William Neil Adger is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Exeter.

John A. Agnew, FBA is a prominent British-American political geographer. Agnew was educated at the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool in England and Ohio State in the United States.

Arthur Westlake Andrews was a British geographer, poet, rock-climber, mountaineer and amateur tennis and badminton player.

Trevor John Barnes, FBA is a British geographer and Professor of Economic geography at the University of British Columbia.

Michael Batty CBE, FBA, FRS, FAcSS is a British urban planner, geographer and spatial data scientist, and Bartlett Professor of Planning in The Bartlett at University College London. He has been Director—now Chairman—of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, set up when he was appointed to UCL in 1995. His research and the work of CASA is focused on computer models of city systems. He was awarded the William Alonso Prize of the Regional Science Association in 2011 for his book Cities and Complexity, the same prize a second time for his book The New Science of Cities in 2017-2018, the University Consortium GIS Research Award in 2012, and the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud, the so-called 'Nobel for geography', in 2013. In 2015, he was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and in 2016, the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI). He also received the Senior Scholar Award of the Complex Systems Society in September 2016.

Brian Joe Lobley Berry is a British-American human geographer and city and regional planner. He is Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental Professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. His urban and regional research in the 1960s sparked geography’s social-scientific revolution and made him the most-cited geographer for more than 25 years.

Paul Joseph Boyle, is a British geographer, academic, and academic administrator. He was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester between 2014 and 2019. He had been Professor of Human Geography at the University of St Andrews from 1999 to 2014, and Chief Executive of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from 2010 to 2014. He took over as Vice-Chancellor of Swansea University at the end of the 2018/2019 academic year.

Stuart Edward Corbridge, FRGS is a British geographer and academic specialising in geopolitics, development studies, and India. Since September 2015, he has been Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University. From 2013 to 2015, he was Provost and Deputy Director of the London School of Economics. He was also Professor of Development Studies at LSE.

Denis Edmund Cosgrove was a distinguished British cultural geographer and Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before this, he was Professor of Human Geography and Dean of the Graduate School at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 1998, he received the prestigious Back Award from the Royal Geographical Society.

Sir Paul James Curran is president of City, University of London. He took up his post in August 2010. Following a period of significant progress, City joined the University of London federation in September 2016. He previously served as vice-chancellor of Bournemouth University (2005–10) and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Southampton, where he is currently a visiting professor. As a member of the senior management team at Southampton, progressing from head of geography to dean of science, Curran was credited with high-profile leadership as head of the Winchester School of Art, part of the University of Southampton.

Julian A. Dowdeswell is a British glaciologist and is the Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute and a Professor of Physical Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

Colonel Sir George Everest CB FRS FRAS FRGS was a British surveyor and geographer who served as Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843. He is best known for having Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, named in his honour.

Herbert John Fleure, FRS was a British zoologist and geographer. He was secretary of the Geographical Association, editor of Geography, and President of the Cambrian Archaeological Association. He served as the President of the Geographical Association in 1948.

Alice Garnett or Alice Crow was a British geographer at Sheffield University. She was the second British woman to become a professor of geography and she was vice-president of the Royal Geographical Society. She was the first woman president of the Institute of British Geographers and a winner of the Murchison Award.

Michael Frank Goodchild is a British-American geographer. He is an Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After nineteen years at the University of Western Ontario, including three years as chair, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988, as part of the establishment of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, which he directed for over 20 years. In 2008, he founded the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies.

Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall, FBA was an English town planner, urbanist and geographer. He was the Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett, University College London and president of both the Town and Country Planning Association and the Regional Studies Association. Hall was one of the most prolific and influential urbanists of the twentieth century.

David W. Harvey is a British-born Marxist economic geographer and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.

Kelvyn Jones, is a British professor (Emeritus) of human quantitative geography at the University of Bristol. He focuses on the quantitative modeling of social science data with complex structure through the application of multilevel models; especially in relation to change and health outcomes.

Vanessa Vivienne Lawrence is a British businessperson, geographer and speaker working internationally.

Melissa Leach, is a British geographer and social anthropologist. She studies sustainability and development concerns in policy-making and has a focus on the politics of science and technology of Africa. As of 2017 she was the Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex.

Diana Liverman is Regents Professor of Geography and Development, and formerly co-Director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, USA. She is an expert on the human dimensions of global environmental change and the impacts of climate on society. She was a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) October 8, 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC.

Paul A. Longley is a British geographer. He is Professor of Geographic Information Science at University College London (UCL), UK, where he also directs the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre. Prior to joining UCL in July 2000, he was the Professor of Geography at the University of Bristol.

Richard Henry Major was a geographer and map librarian who curated the map collection of the British Museum from 1844 until his retirement in 1880.

Doreen Barbara Massey FRSA FBA FAcSS was a British social scientist and geographer.

William Watts McNair was a British surveyor, the first British explorer of Kafiristan.

Dorothy Middleton was a writer and geographer who held several roles at the Royal Geographical Society. Her best-known work is Victorian Lady Travellers (1965).

Hilda Ormsby born Hilda Rodwell Jones was a British academic and geographer.

Jamie Peck FRSC FAcSS is Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the Managing Editor of Environment and Planning A and the convenor of the Summer Institute in Economic Geography.

Dame Judith Anne Rees,, a distinguished academic geographer, was interim director of London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from May 2011 until September 2012. Professor Rees also acts as director for both its Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

Eric Sheppard is a British and American geographer, and Professor of Economic geography at UCLA.

Susan Jane Smith, is a British geographer and academic. Since 2009, she has been Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. Smith previously held the Ogilvie Chair of Geography at the University of Edinburgh from 1990–2004 and until 2009 was a professor of geography at Durham University, where she played a key role in establishing the Institute of Advanced Study. On 1 October 2011, she was conferred the title of Honorary Professor of Social and Economic Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge for five years, which has since been renewed until 2021.

Sir (Laurence) Dudley Stamp, CBE, DSc, D. Litt, LLD, Ekon D, DSc Nat, was professor of geography at Rangoon and London, and one of the internationally best known British geographers of the 20th century.

Sir Nigel John Thrift, is a British academic and geographer. In 2018 he was appointed as Chair of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, a committee that gives independent scientific and technical advice on radioactive waste to the UK government and the devolved administrations. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and Tsinghua University and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol. In 2016 and 2017 he was the Executive Director of the Schwarzman Scholars, an international leadership program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick from 2006 to 2016. He is a leading academic in the fields of human geography and the social sciences.

John Francon Williams FRGS was a Welsh writer, geographer, historian, journalist, cartographer, and inventor, born in Llanllechid, Caernarvonshire. His seminal work was The Geography of the Oceans.