Two people who have helped in developing the vibrant community of walk · listen · create have unexpectedly died in the last couple of weeks. One of whom, Geoff Nicholson, I’ve known since the 1980s but only at a distance, and the other, Edwin Hind, only since 2016, who was a not-so-far off neighbour of mine.

Geoff Nicholson who has been a salon guest a couple of times, as well as volunteering as a judge for one of our writing competitions would probably have met me in the mid 1980s. We were never sure, but knew we both had memories of the same event, a launch party for his second novel The Knot Garden.

We chatted about when our paths might have originally crossed when I interviewed him for Talking Walking in 2010, just after the publication of his first non-fiction book about walking – The Lost Art of Walking. The interview took place over Skype which was a new ‘fangled’ application that neither of us were particularly familiar with and I had tracked him down to where he was living at the time in Los Angeles. By then he had already written a dozen novels and countless blog pieces under the title of The Hollywood Walker.  One of his most acclaimed novels was called Bleeding London in which a key character walks every street in the metropolitan area. As Jack Cornish, another of our salon guests has discovered when setting themselves a similar challenge – it is pretty hard one to achieve.

Geoff went onto write about Walking in Ruins and latterly, having been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer, which he modestly claim “wasn’t rare enough” he wrote a memoir called Walking on Thin Air – a Life’s Journey in 99 Steps, of which he and I discussed in a salon.

I did actually meet Geoff on a couple of occasions. Once was a Royal Photographic Society event in which they’d invited their membership to take photographs of every street in London and had invited Geoff  as a keynote speaker to the launch the challenge, and more recently, at a signing session for Walking on Air where he was interviewed by Travis Elborough whom Geoff had actually introduced to me when we undertook the Talking Walking interview. Travis has written a lovely piece in Caught by the River, which tells another side to the remarkable Geoff Nicholson.

Edwin Hind was an electronic musician who I first encountered in 2016 when with Nigel Bristow and Ian Thompson, we had set up a monthly Sound Salon in Southeast London, that was the seed to Sound Walk September.  At the time he had just started a part-time postgraduate course in Sound Design at Goldsmith’s. Edwin invited us to gigs of his, down in the crypt beneath Saint Nicholas‘s Church in Deptford Green. His combination of music and experimental theatre down in the crypt was quite some spectacle and took a lot of creative thought. 

He lived not very far from where I live now and we frequently saw each other in the street or in the churchyard garden at Saint Nicholas‘, which he maintained as a volunteer gardener, and was also where he had created a recording studio. 

Hats off to both of them…