Walter Stranz - an appreciation
Walter Stranz was the head of School from 1983-1984, the following article, by David Hall, is reproduced by kind permission of Town & Country Planning editor Nick Matthews
With the death of Walter Stranz at the end of August the TCPA lost one of its most respected, devoted and likeable supporters. He came to England from Nazi Germany in 1939 and took a wartime degree before training as a teacher. He first became involved in the Association’s affairs when he was elected to serve on its council in 1972, when he was a Labour councillor on Redditch Borough Council (where he later became Chairman of its Planning Committee and Mayor).
As secretary of the Midlands New Towns Society, a Board Member of Redditch New Town Development Corporation and, in the 1970s, a councillor on the Hereford and Worcester County Council, he provided a unique combination of experience in the two principal levels of local government, the new towns, and the voluntary sector, not to mention holding a teaching post in a local secondary school.
With this experience he brought a thoughtful blend of intelligence, wisdom, commitment and quiet energy. For many years he served on the then Executive Management Committee, and on various working groups, notably the Poplars Working Group (predecessor of the Lightmoor Working Group) and the Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation. He was elected Chairman of the Association’s Council in 1989, a post he held until 1992. Sadly, towards the end of his Chairmanship he contracted Parkinson’s disease, a condition from which he suffered increasingly for the rest of his life.
He wrote extensively for Town & Country Planning, and although deeply involved in planning and local government matters in the Midlands, he wrote perceptively on matters ranging more widely, from the impact of the Channel Tunnel on Northern England, to how water privatisation would weaken the increasingly frail powers of local authorities to direct developments to specific sites in the interest of good planning.
Walter was Chairman at a time when the TCPA was in the early stages of working out its ideas on sustainable development and at the same time setting itself an immensely far-reaching agenda - on the one hand showing through its local projects how the bottom-up approach to decision-making could be made to work in practice, and on the other developing new principles and a new philosophy about planning a sustainable world. It was also a time when the Association was struggling to keep itself afloat financially and operate under a revised constitution. It was a reflection of his inherent good nature and patience as well as his wisdom and political experience that he was able to guide the TCPA at such a challenging period.
Walter was enormously respected and admired locally in his adopted town of Redditch and was made an Honorary Freeman of the town in 1994. A permanent memorial to him is under consideration by the local authority.
David Hall, Vice President and former Director TCPA, October 2005
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