Gordon grew up on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, was educated at Paisley College of Technology and Lancaster University, and began his academic career at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He joined the Geography Department at Durham University in 1999, where he established his status as an internationally significant thinker and shaper of interdisciplinary debates in urban and regional political economy. Gordon’s distinctive writing style expertly combined multiple literary sources from a wide range of disciplinary fields with deep analysis of political economy, policy, and politics. He inspired scholarship in human geography and the social sciences, and his passion for writing about what he cared about and being unafraid to show how much he cared about it influenced a generation of postgraduate researchers and undergraduate students.