My father, Tom Markus, who has died aged 95, was the first professor of building science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where he established a thriving research base and, inspired by his socialist politics and Catholic faith, made huge efforts to address housing problems in the city.
In 1971 he helped set up the Assist project in Govan to rehabilitate old tenement buildings. In 1979 he founded and chaired the Right to Warmth campaign, bringing together legal, architectural and medical expertise to push for improvements in cold and damp housing. He worked to bring an end to “slopping out” in Scottish prisons, and gave evidence in the House of Commons about the dangers of coating residential buildings in flammable material – in 1984, three decades before the Grenfell fire.
