HUNT OF CHESTERTON, Rt Hon Baron CB 1941-2026

[Richard R]

Obituary in the Times of 27 April 2026:

E X T R A C T

Lord Hunt of Chesterton obituary: director-general of the Met Office

World-leading expert on the impact of winds on high structures such as Canary Wharf and a prolific author of meteorological academic treatises

…Hunt became one of the world’s leading experts on winds — or more specifically, their impact on buildings and other high structures, their role in trapping or dispersing air pollution, and their behaviour in hilly terrains.

…Julian Charles Roland Hunt was born in Ootacamund, a hill station in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in 1941. He was the first of five children of Roland Hunt, a Madras-based magistrate and tax collector in the Indian civil service, and his wife, Pauline, daughter of Maxwell Garnett, a former secretary to the League of Nations.

The family returned to the UK at the end of the Second World War and settled in Oxford, where Hunt attended the private Dragon School before boarding at Westminster. 

He saw little of his parents while growing up because his father joined the diplomatic service, later serving as deputy ambassador in Pakistan and Uganda and high commissioner in Trinidad and Tobago when Hunt was an adult. 

Hunt spent the school holidays with assorted great aunts. One, Dorothy, was married to Lewis Fry Richardson, a leading mathematician who ran the Meteorological Office’s Eskdalemuir observatory in southern Scotland. Richardson pioneered mathematical techniques for weather forecasting and had a big influence on his young guest.

…[He] met Marylla Shepherd, a landscape architect, at a tea party in Putney. They married in 1965 and had three children: Jemima, now a journalist, novelist and Labour councillor in Oxford; Matilda, a doctor in Norwich; and Tristram, a former Labour MP who is now director of the Victoria and Albert Museum [knighted in the 2026 New Year Honours].

…In 2000 Tony Blair made him a life peer, with the title Lord Hunt of Chesterton. He sat on the Labour benches and spoke often about the challenges of climate change and the need for sustainable solutions such as tokamaks, before standing down in 2021.

Lord Hunt of Chesterton FRS, meteorologist, was born on September 5, 1941. He died of complications from vascular dementia on April 20, 2026, aged 84

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/lord-hunt-of-chesterton-obituary-director-general-of-the-met-office-jfsmhtdz6