Professor Martin Clarke

Colleagues will be sorry to learn of the death, on 18 April 2025, of Martin Clarke, former Professor of Geographic Modelling and Chief Executive Officer of GMAP Limited.  The following tribute has been contributed by Professor Mark Birkin and Emeritus Professor Alan Wilson.

Martin Clarke was an unusual academic: a successful professor, teacher, and researcher, but also an entrepreneur – founder and driver of GMAP Ltd which became one of The University of Leeds’ most successful spin-out companies. He was always full of life and had lifelong friendships from his undergraduate days to his retirement and beyond. As a geography student, he arrived without any serious mathematics base but became highly skilled and innovative from the time of his undergraduate dissertation through to his PhD – the latter setting, and making significant contributions to, a programme of research on dynamic urban modelling which has still not been completed by the wider community. He came to focus on the computer modelling of the retail sector and this provided the base for his entrepreneurial career.

He worked on his PhD as a Research Assistant in the School of Geography in Leeds, and after its award in 1984, he was appointed to a Lectureship. Around this period, he worked in his ‘spare’ time as a consultant to a group of academics in the Politechnico di Torino and this gave him a taste both for consultancy and for travel. It was in December 1985 at Wetherby races on Boxing Day, that he and Alan Wilson spent the afternoon discussing how to break into consultancy. This was organised as a shadow company through ULIS (University of Leeds Industrial Services) which supplied much needed marketing capability and corporate infrastructure.  Growth was slow at first, but hard work and determination won through and important projects with the Royal Mail and WH Smith facilitated recruitment of the first full-time employee by the end of 1986.  Bigger successes followed rapidly through involvement with motor companies and the optimisation of their dealership networks – first with Toyota, and then on a very big scale with Ford across Europe, and later globally. In addition to his sharp intellect and a deep insight into the importance of spatial analysis and predictive modelling for business planning, Martin embraced the adoption of transformative technological advances in the 1980s. Newly emerging personal computers, high performance Sun workstations, innovative geographical systems and sophisticated digital reporting all became integral to GMAP’s success under his leadership.  By 1990, GMAP was big enough to be spun out as a limited company in its own right, under majority university ownership, with 25 employees.  Continued success with clients ranging from banks to a major water company, pharmaceuticals, petrol forecourts and a number of public sector projects saw GMAP grow profitably into a business employing 120 people.  Over a ten-year period Martin had proven himself to be an inspiring leader to both colleagues and customers, with GMAP creating a unique and original operating model for the conjugation of academic geography with commercial opportunities.  Expressing his view of the situation in a later memoir, Martin opined that ‘the fundamental issues surround people being motivated and determined to succeed and be prepared to leave their laboratories and enter into corporate boardrooms and advisors’ offices of the world’.  Whatever the philosophy, its effectiveness cannot be doubted.

This success attracted potential acquisitors and the auto part of the GMAP, but not the name, was sold to R L Polk, an American company, in 1997. GMAP was then sold to the Skipton Building Society in 2001. It still exists as GMAP Analytics Ltd and is located in the Nexus building on the University campus in Leeds.  However, there is clearly a legacy which is considerably more than corporate.  In GMAP’s lifespan under Martin’s direction it has been estimated that more than 320 employees were recruited, trained and developed, many of these now enjoying high profile positions within UK retailing and its attendant industries.  A significant number have gone on to establish their own advisory businesses, almost certainly benefitting from the advice and encouragement which Martin was always generous to offer.

Martin’s career was rooted in Leeds for more than forty years, though he had a considerable international reputation both academically and commercially. He travelled widely (with a reputation that his travels nearly always were replete with extensive delays – cancellations, technical issues, fog!). It was a measure of his academic standing to be appointed to a nationally scarce ‘new blood’ lectureship in 1984.  In tandem with his secondment with GMAP he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1990, and in 1994 as Professor of Geographic Modelling. He was Chief Executive Officer of GMAP Limited from its incorporation in 1990 until 2005 when he returned to academic life. In this later part of his academic career Martin continued to exploit his understanding of the business world and a substantial corporate address book to the benefit of students and colleagues in the School of Geography.  Most notably in 2013 he rapidly assembled a network of commercial partners to underpin the Consumer Data Research Centre.  CDRC was the beneficiary of substantial UKRI funding, with Martin becoming its Deputy Director.  Twelve years on, CDRC continues to prosper.

Martin was a passionate and lifelong supporter of Burnley, having enjoyed the club’s only championship success in the top division as a young boy in 1961.  However, he was sufficiently pragmatic and broad-minded to provide corporate support to Leeds United, including the maintenance by GMAP of an executive box at Elland Road ‘for marketing purposes’! His other sporting interests included squash, cricket and golf, once revelling in his successful procurement of the signature to an important licence agreement from Stephen Polk himself in the course of a corporate golf event in North Michigan.  Beyond sports, music was also a great love.  Another favourite traveller’s tale had him sharing a transatlantic cabin with Bruce Springsteen, of whom he was a great admirer … but would far rather it had been Van Morrison!

In 2009, he married Mary Coughlan (whom he had known as a junior lecturer when working on the first DHSS NHS Performance Indicator working group in 1984). They lived between Yorkshire and Devon until Martin eventually left Yorkshire in 2018 to live, very happily, with Mary in Totnes in Devon.  He leaves two beloved sons, Ciaran and Joshua, from his first marriage.