We got to know Doreen Massey, who died on Friday, during many years of working with and writing for Soundings, the journal which she founded with Mike Rustin and Stuart Hall. During that time she became to us not just a respected senior colleague and a close ally, but a friend. Our political instincts and sympathies often seemed more closely aligned with hers than with those of any other such senior figure that we knew – perhaps a result of the fact that, like, us, she had grown up in the North of England, outside of that culturally privileged zone – the North of London – in which eventually she made her home. Doreen’s pioneering works as a geographer (she sometimes rejected the term ‘cultural geographer’ as too restrictive) was informed by a concern with understanding power relationships in all of their complexity, and by a set of political commitments which put that work into allegiance with radical movements for democracy, equality and freedom, in many different spheres and on many different scales. As such, she was forever alert to and interested in the potential which new movements as well as new intellectual innovations might have, although she had no time either for dogma or for modishness.
