David was great friend and a gentle-man.  That said, we didn’t always agree on systems but that didn’t matter at all.  David was an original, and his approach to engineering and systems was unique.  I was delighted when he became President of the IStructE.  A breath of fresh air. 

I’ve known David for about 50 years.  I first met him when he gave a seminar in the 1970s at Imperial College.  By 1975 he had published his landmark paper in the ICE Proceedings on structural safety and fuzzy sets.  I recall bumping into a colleague – a world expert on soil mechanics, but not a systems thinker –  on the stairs outside the mail room in the civil engineering building at Imperial College.  He was holding the proceedings and muttered a question to me to ask if I thought the paper was a joke.  Oh no, I disabused him.  It was a landmark!  I continued down the stairs with a smile on my face.  And David’s paper won the ICE’s Telford Gold Medal,  David was a major innovator and I feel honoured to have known him. 

David was a stalwart supporter – both as an Author and Editorial Board Member – of the Civil Engineering (and Environmental) Systems Journal since its beginnings in 1983.  He will be much missed in the forward-thinking engineering community.  I will also miss him as a friend.

When David retired from the University of Bristol a special meeting was organised by his colleagues to celebrate his achievements.  The event went under the title of a ‘Symposium to Felicitate David Blockley’.  I was honoured to be invited to give a paper – “A Systems Journey with the Systems Boys” – of whom David was one of the key players.  The papers from that meeting were compiled into a Special Issue of CEES in 2010.  It marked a waypoint in systems thinking, an area in which David was pioneer.