Sir Patrick Geddes 1854-1932 Influential Son of Ballater Ballater, Royal Deeside, Scotland Ballater :: Profile :: Reading :: Links :: What's New You are in: Ballater > Geddes > home page

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Sir Patrick Geddes

“This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.”  - Patrick Geddes

Geddesian Motif by Artist: Ian Mitchell

Born in Ballater, Scotland on 2 October 1854, Sir Patrick Geddes became a prime example of the free exploring minds which flourished in Victorian Britain.

Patrick Geddes was the son of a Regular soldier, with none of the privileges of wealth or position, yet by the age of 24 he was a biologist of great promise, his research papers already published by the Royal Society. The British Association for the Advancement of Science employed him to set up a zoological station at Stonehaven for Aberdeen University in 1879, then sent him on a research mission to Mexico. He contracted an illness there which made him temporarily blind, and thereafter even when he recovered he was unable to continue research which caused eye strain when using a microscope. Thus deprived of the first outlet for his enquiring mind, he applied his biological understanding of the needs of living organisms to mankind, developing his theories of the appropriate conditions to bring maximum stimulus to both body and mind.

Patrick developed, and put into practice in the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, advanced ideas for the renovation of old housing and the planning and building of new homes (Ramsay Gardens), using the Camera Obscura (The Outlook Tower) as a teaching medium to spread his ideas. At the same time he developed theories on education, organising a series of Summer Schools which ranged widely over the arts and sciences, and their application to town planning and what we now call ecology.

In 1896 one of the episodes of international unrest which so exercised the mind was the war between Turkey and Armenia, which caused a flood of refugees all over the Eastern Mediterranean area. Patrick was horrified by their plight, and he spent the winter in Cyprus helping some of them to resettle by establishing small agricultural and industrial units. These events proved to be a watershed and over the next thirty years Patrick organised a series of international exhibitions which taught that good planning always gives priority to the wellbeing, both physical and mental, of the inhabitants.

He toured France, the USA, and worked extensively in India, where he met Gandhi and Tagore and exchanged ideas both philosophical and practical. He was invited to Israel to design the new Jerusalem University in 1919, and a friend from that time summed up his achievement: "Geddes's great achievement in life has been the making of a bridge between Biology and Social Science" Patrick Geddes`s achievements were recognised when he was knighted shortly before his death in 1932 in Montpellier France where he had founded the College Des Ecossais, an international teaching establishment.