Biography
The son of a miner, Hall was born and brought up in North Seaton, Ashington, Northumberland, where he attended Bedlington Grammar School until 1949. He worked in the mining industry as a surveyor before going into business on his own account.
In the 1980s his company, Cameron Hall Developments masterminded the construction of the MetroCentre shopping mall in Dunston, Gateshead. The development was not without its critics locally; reputedly, the script of the BBC drama Our Friends in the North was changed to remove a character resembling Sir John who took advantage of tax breaks to build a shopping centre.
In April 2010, Hall announced that he is suffering from inoperable prostate cancer and was about to embark on a course of intensive chemotherapy. As of February 2011, the cancer is being kept under control by medication and Sir John is concentrating on his final project, a £2.5 million rose garden at his Wynyard Park estate.
On 10 February 2011, at a ceremony at the Shipley Art Gallery, Sir John and his wife, Lady Hall, were given the freedom of Gateshead for their services to leisure, retail, business and sport.
Read more about this topic: John Hall (businessman)
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“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)