It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Michael Harverson. Professor David Morgan, Honorary Vice President of BIPS, writes:

Michael Harverson, a member of BIPS for many years, died on 2 March 2017. He was born in 1937, and spent his official career as a schoolteacher. For some time in the 1960s, he taught at the CMS School in Isfahan. Then, in 1967, he joined the staff of Watford Boys’ Grammar School as a teacher of French, where he remained until retirement, eventually becoming Deputy Headmaster. But his great enthusiasm was the vernacular buildings of Iran and other countries in the region, especially those of mud-brick, and, most especially of all, mills. On these subjects he became a leading authority – his expertise founded to a considerable extent on travel and fieldwork – and he published extensively in that area. He is perhaps best known as the author, with Elizabeth Beazley, of Living with the Desert. Working Buildings of the Iranian Plateau (1982).  Ronald Cookson of the Mills Archive (of which Michael was one of the original trustees) says of him, “universally respected as a kind and gentle man, he was a gentleman and a scholar”, and David Stronach, the first Director of BIPS, writes of his work that “his detailed contributions to the study of Iran’s vernacular mud-brick architecture were keenly observed and widely appreciated.” He will be greatly missed by his colleagues, his family, and many others: not least by the writer of this note, to whom he was an immensely valued friend for fifty years.