My friend Gavin Poynter, who has died aged 76, studied the transformation of east London following the collapse of the traditional dockland industries.
Gavin joined the University of East London in 1988, and became head of the school of social sciences in 2000. Andrew Calcutt, a former colleague, recalls that as a senior academic manager, “he spoke softly but with great authority”. As chair of the London East Research Institute, Gavin worked with a range of partners in evaluating the impact of the London Olympics in 2012, publishing several edited collections.
Born in Strood, Kent, Gavin was the son of Stanley, who worked in a paper mill, and Annie Hall, a sometime dinner lady; his brother Terry was two years older. Gavin passed the 11-plus to go to Gillingham grammar school, but opted instead for Gillingham technical school, so that he could play football rather than rugby. He played for Sheppey United and while studying economics at Lancaster in the late 1960s, he played for the university team as well as semi-professionally for Lancaster City.
In 1972 he moved into a house in Canterbury with a group of friends with a common interest in leftwing politics, and embarked on an MA in politics at the University of Kent. He also worked as a tutor for the Open University and for the Workers’ Educational Association.
He moved to London in 1980 to join the education department of the Trades Union Congress. He met Alison Mitchell, then working for the local government workers’ union Nalgo (later absorbed into Unison): they had two children, Eleanor and Alex, and married in 2007. I first met him in 1981 when, with the academic Alan Hudson, we collaborated in producing Taking Control: A Handbook for Trade Unionists.
In 2020 Gavin and Michael Rustin, professor and head of the sociology department at North East London Polytechnic, published Building a Radical University: A History of the University of East London. This was as much a personal as a professional triumph for Gavin, who suffered from chronic ill health. He continued to write, publishing The Political Economy of State Intervention in 2020, in which he, in collaboration with Phil Mullan, an economist and writer, advanced a critique of fashionable theories of “neo-liberalism”.
Gavin loved swimming and wine. He was an inspirational teacher, devoted to his family and a loyal friend.
Alison died in 2022. Gavin is survived by his children, Eleanor and Alex, four grandchildren, Oscar, Finley, Ada and Leila, and his brother, Terry.
