In the late 1990s, the social scientist and author Mayer Hillman predicted that, in the future, our children and grandchildren would ask us what we did to prevent global climate catastrophe. Twenty years later Greta Thunberg, addressing the UN, thundered: “You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you.”
Twenty-five years ago, Hillman also warned that public denial of the climate crisis would only begin to crack when people in the global north were personally affected – by the creation of millions of environmental refugees from uninhabitable parts of the world, for instance, or after their homes had been flooded several times over and they could no longer insure them.
Hillman, who has died aged 94, not only anticipated social and environmental problems decades in advance of most other people, he also came up with solutions that seemed outlandish at the time but are now considered unremarkable.
In 1984 he proposed energy audits and thermal ratings for buildings; in 2007 EPCs (energy performance certificates) were rolled out across England and Wales. In the early 90s, he suggested that road intersections should be raised to pavement level to give priority to pedestrians, a now commonplace practice. Cycle lanes and 20mph speed limits – Hillman was advocating these more than 40 years ago.
Increasingly, his energies were taken up with the climate crisis. His 2004 book, How We Can Save the Planet, described it as “the most serious environmental threat that the world has ever faced”. He dismissed individual gestures as futile, even though he had not flown for decades.
In an analogy with the consensus around wartime rationing, he proposed carbon rationing as the only way to prevent serious damage, foreseeing a time when people would pity someone passing in a car – a sign of an emergency requiring them to use up a precious part of their annual carbon quota.
Soon, though, he came to believe that it was too late to save the planet, any lame protest about human beings’ need for hope airily brushed aside, as though if Hillman himself could tolerate its absence, so too would most people.
Born in West Hampstead, north London, to Scottish Jewish parents, Mayer (known as Mickey by family and many friends), was the youngest of three boys. His father, David, an orthodox Jew who fled the pogroms in Lithuania to settle in Glasgow, was a portrait painter and stained-glass artist; his mother, Annie, a GP.
At the outbreak of the second world war, Mickey and his brothers, Ellis and Harold, were evacuated to homes in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. His gentile hosts offered him meat and fish, which, coming from a kosher home, he politely declined; Hillman was vegetarian thereafter. All three boys would come home for the Sabbath, leaving school early on Fridays to take the train to Finchley Road station. On Sunday evenings, they returned to Rickmansworth.
After two years, their father acceded to their request to come home on condition they stay on at the Rickmansworth school. So, until the end of the war, they did the same journey in reverse, getting up at 6.30am, making their own sandwiches, and walking to the station. The experience proved formative: Hillman would later contrast what he called his “free range” childhood with the “battery” lives experienced by children in the 21st century.
At 22, after qualifying from the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, he became partner in a newly established north London firm of architects. While there, in 1956, he co-designed for a competition a prototype for the first pedestrian-oriented new town in the UK.
Several years later, he decided to switch professions: the catalyst was Colin Buchanan’s influential 1963 report Traffic in Towns, which, while it recognised the potential downsides of rapidly growing car ownership, nevertheless argued for reorganising cities to accommodate it. Hillman disagreed and embarked on a doctorate at Edinburgh University, examining the social and environmental aspects of personal mobility and making the case for reducing the need for motorised transport. By then, in 1964, he had married Heidi Krott, who had come to Britain from Vienna in 1939, aged two, in her refugee mother’s arms.
A research post at the thinktank Political and Economic Planning, later the Policy Studies Institute (PSI), where he stayed for the rest of his career, allowed him to develop his most innovative thinking. In a 1979 report, Walking Is Transport, co-written with Anne Whalley, Hillman deplored the omission in national transport data of journeys of less than a mile, most of them walking. Unusually for a male researcher of the time, he recognised that this rendered women’s chief mode of travel invisible (15 years later, walking was added to official research data).
From the early 70s, Hillman was also studying children’s independent mobility. His co-authored report One False Move (1990), comparing 1971 survey results with 1990, revealed a dramatic drop in children’s independent travel: where previously 80% of seven- and eight-year-olds had gone to school unaccompanied, 20 years later only 9% were doing so, the rest accompanied on foot or driven there, mostly by their mothers (Hillman alert again to the implications for women, in exhaustion and their ability to work outside the home).
The reduction of child deaths over this period did not mean the roads were safer, he maintained. On the contrary, child road deaths were down because the roads had become so dangerous that they had been purged of children by fearful parents, dramatically curtailing children’s freedom.
Indeed, “stranger danger” should be redefined, he argued, since far more children were killed by strangers behind the steering wheel of a car or lorry than by any other means. “Danger should be removed from children rather than children from danger,” he concluded.
He never actually retired, but his output dropped off after 2018, when the PSI closed. An impassioned advocate of cycling for environmental and health reasons, as well as for the way in which it made the world accessible to children, Hillman rode his bike round London into advanced old age. He was full of contradictions: proud of his Jewish background yet an avowed “militant atheist”, cheerfully apocalyptic, dogged but big-hearted.
Heidi died in 2017; Hillman is survived by his sons, Josh and Saul, and three grandchildren, Jasmine, Eva and Rafi.
Mayer Hillman, social scientist, born 30 October 1931; died 25 September 2026
