Some time in the early 2000s a colleague in the office answered the phone. “It’s Richard Rogers,” they said. “The Richard Rogers.” He was calling out of the blue from a pool in Tuscany and when I got to the phone he apologised for being a bit deaf because he had water in his ear. Richard wanted to check out something he had heard about the urban regeneration company (URC) in East Manchester and I was the person he knew in Manchester who he felt could tell him what was going on.

Much will be written about Richard’s architectural legacy but, to us urbanists, he was a crucial figure in what became known as the urban renaissance in the UK. This was the change in attitudes and government policy at the turn of the millennium that saw a move away from suburban sprawl and towards promotion of compact, mixed-use, walkable cities. It seems obvious now, but it really wasn’t in the 1990s.

Richard was chair of the Urban Task Force formed in 1998 and as a Labour peer he worked with both John Prescott and Ken Livingston, convincing the Labour government and the GLA of the importance of urbanism. I remember on one occasion he asked me to play the role of John Prescott, who was known to have a short attention span, when he was rehearsing a presentation on the task force’s findings.

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