Doreen Massey, socialist feminist, engaged geographer and influential public intellectual, died during the night of 11 March 2016, aged 72. Tributes poured in through social media. “Now we understand what everyone else felt about David Bowie”, was one attempt to convey the scale of our loss. Doreen’s body could sometimes be frail but her mind was brilliant and tough. As a character she was strong, passionate, curious and also imbued with modesty and kindness. She radiated political energy and humanity, sparkling with a cheeky wit.

With a steady flow of books, such as For Space, The Anatomy of Job Loss, and Space, Place and Gender and contributions to the books of others such as Huw Beynon’s Digging Deeper, a collection on the politics of the 1984/85 miners strike, she worked alongside others such as David Harvey, to establish geography as the intellectual source of a powerful, integrated critique of predatory capitalism in the age of climate change and the corporate driven global market.

Her academic base was the Open University to which she was strongly loyal because of its openness and accessibility to all who wanted to learn. She turned down professorships from elsewhere, including from Oxford, which she considered too exclusive and elitist for her far-reaching educational mission. She became a mentor, both through her writings and through a tireless round of talks and personal conversation, to generations of young geographers; their appreciation was evident in the Twitter storm that followed the shock of her death.

She was proud of winning the Prix Vautrin Lud (“Nobel de Geographie”) and she organized a celebration with her large and varied circle of friends in typically convivial Doreen style. On the other hand, she was appalled to hear that the vehemently hated establishment wanted to award her an Order of the British Empire (OBE). The result was an urgent phone call to get contact details of other refuseniks of royal awards Ken Loach, John Palmer and more in order to plan how to ensure that her refusal had a maximally antiroyalist impact.