and the Ministry of Town and Country Planning (From 1951 this was renamed the Ministry of Housing and Local Government). Within the ministry Lichfield became a leading member of a small group that worked to accelerate the pace of change towards the findings of the Schuster report of 1950, which recommended transformation of planning education through inclusion of the social sciences of economics, geography and sociology. In the early 1950s he was also a founder-member of the Land Use Society, a discussion and dining club of civil servants, academics and private-sector developers. Later in 1965, he played a similar role in helping to launch the Regional Studies Association, which promoted research in new disciplines and their application to planning practice. In 1959–60 Lichfield took leave from the ministry to become a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. There he further developed some of the key ideas from his PhD to the form of the Planning Balance Sheet, which was later retitled Community Impact Evaluation. In 1962 he founded the consultancy partnership, Nathaniel Lichfield Associates (now Lichfields), which became an almost indispensable part of many professional planning teams in the period of British planning covering the construction of the second wave of new towns, including Milton Keynes and Peterborough, in the late 1960s. In 1962 University of California offered him a full professorship in the College of Environmental Design. He received a rival offer from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He chose however to return to work in Britain when Richard Llewelyn-Davies, the founder of the Bartlett School of Architecture and Design at University College London offered him a Professorship there. In 1966 he was also appointed to the new chair in the Economics of Environmental Planning at UCL. Returning to Britain in his new position allowed him to pursue his research and teaching at UCL in parallel with the development of his specialist consultancy, Nathaniel Lichfield Associates. Together with other leading academics he played an important role in the planning of Milton Keynes. He was also involved the creation of the original masterplan for Peterborough new town, which was headed by the young master-planner Tom Hancock. In the late 1960s and early 70s, Lichfield combined his parallel academic and professional responsibilities with a variety of public roles. He served as the president of the Royal Town Planning Institute in 1966. He also