On March 9th, Sheila Peace gave her Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Social Gerontology at the Open University which was entitled : “Reflecting on Ageing and Environment”.

Drawing on the OU’s didactic approach to nearly everything, she began by inviting us, a large audience, to reflect on our own places of birth; a brief but dramatic silence followed, privately overwhelmed by imagined ambulance sirens and baby screams from far and wide. It was broken by Sheila’s vivid account of how she herself came to be born in Epsom Hospital. Following a quick reference to schooldays, it was not long before she was crossing the Severn to the land of her mother’s. Here she presented us with images of her aunt’s house in Resolven and houses she knew in Swansea as a student. Another rapid switch turned our attention to the Centre for Environment and Social Studies of Ageing, where she undertook groundbreaking research in the 1980s with Leonie Kellaher and Diane Willcocks, and then some time later with Caroline Holland and Leonie.

For her colleagues in the Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies (CABS), it was a strangely confusing afternoon. One moment we were arriving to celebrate a high point in CABS’ 15-year existence, wondering if the lecture’s title was a play on Sheila’s recent achievement in the you-know-what of research resourcing and the next we were spotting Mim, Tony, Malcolm, Judith, Chris and other old BSG friends, in various states of just-arrived disorientation: a moment later we were settling down to listen to Brenda, the OU’s much-loved Vice-Chancellor, bullet-pointing Sheila’s long list of achievements.

Sheila presented many photographs of people and places and recounted many vivid life experiences, but the lecture was much more than an illustrated CV. She used her own life story, along with material from past research, to weave a persuasive case for gerontology taking spatial environments plus the biography/history interface rather more seriously than heretofore.