Jolyon Gill

Sad news to report - Jolyon Gill, an independent UK bridge engineering consultant who I'm sure several of my readers will know, died yesterday, of a stroke.

Gill worked for Freeman Fox and Partners, the renowned long span bridge designers, and was head of their successor Hyder's special structures group until 2001. He then moved to Faber Maunsell (now part of Aecom) to become their UK head of bridges and special structures. In 2003, a "reappraisal of business objectives" led to his departure, to set up his own firm Jolyon Gill Consultancy Ltd. He was always active in the wider bridge engineering community, for example working on the second edition of the IStructE's guidance manual for bridge access gantries, and serving on the Editorial Advisory Panel for the ICE's Bridge Engineering Journal.

I mentioned him briefly here on a previous occasion, for his talk at a symposium on learning from bridge failures. He struck me as someone both with a sound grasp of the way in which the wider world impacts upon the purely technical, as well as a desire to move beyond conventional wisdom.