Ian Wray. Planner, writer and musician.

Ian Wray, former chief planner with Northwest Development Agency, is an honorary professor at Liverpool University’s Heseltine Institute, and a steering group member for the UK2070 Commission, an independent inquiry into regional inequalities. He chairs the Birkenhead Park World Heritage Site bid and the Liverpool Waters Conservation Board, and he has just stood down as vice chair of World Heritage UK. He is a member of the interim steering group for the bicentenary of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

Who has been your greatest inspiration?

The late Professor Sir Peter Hall. I first started reading Peter’s journalism in New Society in my school library in the 1960s. I am sure they kindled my interest in planning. Many years later I met Peter when I was a TCPA trustee and he was TCPA president. He invited me to work with him on a couple of papers. It was like being asked to join the band by Paul McCartney. In one of our papers we set out an idea for high-speed rail travel on an east-west axis in the north of England. A few weeks later, by coincidence or design, the idea was picked up by George Osborne’s speech writer and turned into ‘Northern Powerhouse Rail’.

What has been your best idea?

After getting married to my architect wife Christine (an IHBC member like my daughter Katie), it would have to be writing. It all started when I submitted an article to the Architects Journal. Not only did they publish it but they came back asking for more, and so began a five-year ‘second career’ as a freelance journalist.

Writing my two books on big plans in Britain and then in America (Great British Plans: who made them and how they worked and No Little Plans: how government built America’s wealth and infrastructure) was a revelation. The amazing truth about British plans is that central government rarely has anything to do with them, sitting on the side lines as referee, caretaker or even objector. The lead is invariably taken by the institutions of civil society: the great estates, businesses, charities, universities, local government and irrepressible individuals with a bee in their bonnet. In America, at least up until the early 1970s, quite the opposite was true. Federal government led the way: the dam building and irrigation of the west, the national parks, the interstate highways, the moon shot (catalyst for the microcomputer), creating the internet, and much more. The economist Milton Friedman destroyed belief in plans, insisting that government achieved nothing and should be done away with. The facts just do not support Friedman’s still hugely influential dogma.

What would you like to have been if you had not become a conservationist?

I am more a planner than conservationist. I might have become a full time academic, but I wonder if I would have missed the rough and tumble of working in political environments and getting things done.

At a party how do you reply when someone asks what you do?

It depends on who I am talking to. I might say I am a planner, a writer, or a musician.

What is the biggest frustration in your job?

I continue to be mystified by Unesco’s decision to take Liverpool off its list of world heritage sites. Its main concern was a speculative outline planning permission (now some 10 years old) for tall buildings in derelict docks, which have never been built and are never likely to be. Big and tall buildings have always been in Liverpool’s DNA: the former New Brighton Tower, the ‘Dockers Cathedral’ grain silos, the two cathedrals, the Liver Building, the Tobacco Warehouse, and not forgetting all those huge cruise ships, liners and oil tankers. Meanwhile, the Tower of London World Heritage Site has been surrounded by some of the tallest new buildings in western Europe, including the Shard, especially in the City of London where there was absolutely no previous tradition of building tall. City conservation obviously has to embrace change: cities can not be frozen forever in cold preservationist rigidity. Yet in Liverpool, unlike London, preservation appeared to be Unesco’s ethos.

What would you like to be doing in five years’ time?

I hope I will be finishing a book on how the British created rock music and sold it to the world. And that the preparations for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway bicentenary in 2030 will be steaming ahead. Railways are a gift to the world and it all started here.

What is your favourite building?

The Baronial Hall at Chethams Hospital School (as it then was) in Manchester, where as a boy I ate my lunch, served from the buttery behind the medieval screen, sitting at a long refectory table.

Your favourite place?

Peckforton Hill in Cheshire.

Your favourite book?

Simon Jenkins’ England’s Best 1,000 Churches. For years we used it to take us to wonderful historic buildings, often in the most hidden, remote and quiet places. It has been a long, unfinished, spiritual odyssey.

What do you do in your spare time?

I am in two big bands, and a jazzy R&B outfit. It is amazing to be surrounded by people with music degrees who can not improvise.

How do you do that, Ian?

The difference between reading music and improvising is the difference between reading a book and having a conversation. You have to listen, respond and react, rather than accepting the tyranny of the dots.

What organisations are you a member of?

Out of the Blue Jazz Orchestra, Merseyside Civic Society, UK2070 Commission, World Heritage UK, Town and Country Planning Association and National Trust.

Which one issue would you particularly like the IHBC to campaign on?

Planning and conservation are at a low ebb in Britain, worn down by underfunding, and the proponents of American-style private affluence and public squalor. I would like to see the IHBC and all the other built environment professional bodies campaigning vigorously to showcase the many examples of successful plans, including Winchelsea, the Fairfield Moravian Settlement, Birkenhead Park, Milton Keynes, the motorways and HS1. At its best, town planning is the greatest of the civilised arts. We need to demonstrate its achievements if we want to begin the fight back against its detractors.