#Scurf181: Conversation with Nicholas Walton
The former BBC journalist, think tank comms strategist and author on climate change, Italy and all things communications
I’ve crafted a new series of Substacks where I speak with peers about their work — writing, photographing, philosophising, painting, etc. — what moves them, inspires them, keeps them going. As I evolve in my own writing routines, I’ve felt enriched and educated by these conversations. This is a practice I’ve set up to get to know more from and about other writers, artists, photographers through their lives and stories.
You can read the earlier conversations in this series here!
For this edition of Conversations, I speak with Nicholas Walton, journalist, author, communications strategist, podcaster and consultant. He is based in Italy and is currently working on his next book: Orange Sky, Rising Water, which attempts to explain the Netherlands’ past, present and the challenges of the future through ten different walks across it. He is currently documenting portions of his work and his walking on his Ten Walks Explain Everything Substack. You can find him on LinkedIn, X, and listen to some of his BBC documentaries here.
I read somewhere that you’ve lived in 11 countries! What were all these places? And can you talk to me a little bit about your experience of these 11 countries?
I’m from Newcastle in Northeast England, but thanks to parents who wanted an adventure I grew up in Kenya and New Zealand before returning to the Northeast. Between school and university I was briefly an au pair in Vienna, Austria, then ended up in Budapest while trying to work out whether to be an academic or a journalist. I was the BBC’s person in Warsaw and Sarajevo, and was based in Moscow as a reporter during the Iraq War. And since meeting my fantastic (Italian) wife I’ve added Italy, Singapore, the Netherlands, and now Italy again. (I’m tempted to count London and southern England as a different country to the Northeast, so that would make it 12…) This time I’m staying put, if only for my son’s sake. We live on a bit of land above the sea on the outskirts of Genoa, with dogs and chickens and space to grow vegetables, so I’ve finally found the place where I want to grow a bit older. Otherwise I’m fond in different ways of all the countries I’ve lived in, but NZ probably left the biggest impression on me - I still identified as largely kiwi years later when I was at university. A great country!
What was it like working with the BBC as a video journalist? I read in one of your recent substacks that you worked with the older format of video and audio recording and equipment. Could you share a little bit about that experience?
For much of my BBC career I stayed away from TV and stuck to radio. I found TV production cumbersome, and TV news quite limited, while radio was agile and you could really create a sense of place with audio - and it was far more information-rich. TV news is generally uninterested in some of the more engaging questions out there, and some of the stories I worked on in places like Sierra Leone or Georgia would have been really tricky to do for TV. I’ve kept up my filming and editing skills - one of the weirder parts of my career was as a TV sports reporter for Fox Sports Asia (“Where sport goes BOOM!”). But I’m now looking back towards video as technology is changing everything, especially for a writer looking for a broader audience. When I started out, TV literally meant filming with a crew that was separate from the video editor, and radio meant ¼ inch magnetic tape that you cut manually with a razor blade. In contrast I’ve recently been filming with a tiny DJI camera that’s literally about 7cm or so across, and I edit on my laptop. I’m trying to shoot and edit my own series of 40 or 50 short films that’ll accompany ‘Orange Sky, Rising Water’ when it gets published. And of course there’s a home for it on YouTube - the next challenge is finding that broader audience.
You’ve written a couple of books: Genoa, 'La Superba': The Rise and Fall of a Merchant Pirate Superpower and Singapore, Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency.
Could you talk to me about the Genoa book?
Genoa is my wife’s city, and it’s a vastly interesting and very authentic port that has been shaped by its incredible geography. There are loads of places like Rome and Florence, but nothing on Genoa, which was Venice’s twin and existential rival. Both were vital connective tissue for the whole early medieval European economy, and linked it to the Levant and Asia. It was a really buccaneering place with a very dark side, and went on to produce characters like Colombus and Andrea Doria, pioneer banking, and even introduce football to Italy. I wrote the book in the six months we had here during my wife’s maternity leave, interviewing everybody from ageing transexual prostitutes to basil farmers. It was a rush but I think it’s opened many eyes to an incredible city.
How did you come to write about Singapore? What year was that and how did you find the country?
Singapore was the next place we ended up, and also had an extraordinary story. From being a tiny post-colonial island, spat out by Malaysia in the mid 60s, it’s now in many ways the world’s most successful country. But how? To answer it I walked 53km in one day across it, looking at everything that was part of its story, and examined the challenges it faced in the future. It was quite a walk, but it worked well - there’s nothing like walking across something to get a good feeling for it, looking into unusual or unnoticed places. It’s a form of slow journalism for me. And with Singapore there’s also tension: how on earth can this tiny place keep it going? It’s so small that if it slips up it has very little wiggle room.
As a journalist you’ve donned various hats — foreign correspondent, editor and producer of TV and radio programmes, author, and various others. Can you share how this work shaped your worldview?
Like many journalists I just started off curious, and wanted to know how the world worked, and a career sort of built up along the way. I found that I’m also good at writing or explaining things with a story - so journalism really suited me.
The bit that’s shaped me the most may have been as output editor of the BBC World Service’s flagship Newshour programme. Sitting in the editor’s chair was often the best job in journalism, with an hour to fill and the world to call on. It could be unbelievably pressured and demanding, but at its best it was exhilarating, with room for real intelligence, teamwork and creativity. Sometimes it was the big stories, like the Indian Ocean Tsunami, but it was trying to make something out of the quiet days when the editor really earned their corn. That really pushed me, and I loved it.
I believe there must’ve been many challenges in living in various new countries, adapting to new cultures. What were they and how did you cope?
As a journalist - and because I’m curious - simply trying to understand something about the guts of each country was what I set out to do. I read as much as possible, talked to people, travelled around, and got out on my feet and walked. There’s never a single definitive truth about anywhere, but that makes it even more fun to try to understand why something happens as it does in that country. Imagine for instance you were trying to work out how on earth the British ended up with Brexit, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn, beyond what you simply read about in newspapers. I find questions like that endlessly interesting.
Is there a country, a culture, a people that you’d love to return to?
I’m keen to revisit Poland two decades after living there, with the country blossoming into the nation that it always wanted to be. It’s a great country, full of sights and history, and many Poles are fizzing with dynamism compared to Europeans further west - the type of thing that Europe desperately needs if it’s to survive this century.
You live in Italy now, a country known so much for its fashion, cars, food, literature.
Italy is an extraordinary place, and I’m making a stab at unpicking it in the series of ten walks that I’m putting up on my Ten Walks That Explain Everything substack. For a short answer, I think Italy is very good at putting itself into a shop window, for showing its best (and its best is gorgeous), and bewitching you so that you forget about the less entrancing bits (every country has them). That gives it great confidence in its history, its food, how it goes about car design and fashion. Other countries could learn from that confidence.
It also faces massive challenges, and it doesn’t necessarily have a great record in engaging with them, let alone tackling them. Just to take one example, many kids have already broken up for 3 long months of summer holidays. That’s dreadful for educational outcomes, especially for poorer kids whose parents can’t afford care or holiday camps. And it’s dreadful for women, many of whom struggle to juggle earning a living with looking after the kids (female participation in the workforce is very low). But Italians also firmly believe in those long summers full of ice cream and sun, of lazy afternoons with friends at the beach club, and making the most of the summer - so it’s rare to find anybody who criticises those long summer holidays, or even see them as a potential problem.
You’ve also done ghost-writing for fintech companies, report writing for the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), reporting, writing, among a myriad other projects. Which of these formats of writing would you say is your go-to, if not favourite?
Without doubt writing books is a privilege, and something that I’ve wanted to do all my life. It really allows thoughts and ideas to develop, and I feel an immense gratitude to anybody who reads one of them - the time and attention a reader gives to a book is worth far more than the money it costs.
I also like trying new ideas, especially as technology now allows anybody to try things out. I had a blast filming the first of my videos as I was walking in the Netherlands, which will accompany my book. I’m feeling my way a bit but I’ll start producing them in the autumn, and see how they go. It feels natural to find ways to accompany a book. On that same note, I’m also enjoying writing the Substack posts, which is like having your very own newspaper column. I promise I’ll be more systematic with it once the first draft is out of the way.
How did you find yourself working in the nonprofit, think tank sector? How do you think communications has evolved in this space over the last few years?
I was the Europe editor in the BBC World Service newsroom, but felt that BBC journalism was heading in a way I didn’t like - too dominated by TV, and unsure about its own audience. My wife spotted a job leading communications for a start-up pan-European foreign policy think tank (ECFR). I applied with a few ideas about how think tanks in that space could use modern media tech to break out of the ivory tower and engage directly with audiences on big issues, and got the job. I got cold feet for a bit, but met the boss over a nice lunch and changed my mind. It was a good move, however much I loved journalism.
Communications in this space has recently been revolutionised, following on from that idea of engagement with a mass audience through being able to make your own content and connect directly with people. But it’s not been fully grasped, as so much NGO/think tank comms is unimaginative and loves to speak to the already-enthused audience rather than dive into arguments about big issues.
Look at climate, which should be about the big questions concerning systemic shifts from fossil fuel to clean energy economies and societies, and that means difficult choices, building coalitions, talking to those who disagree. Unfortunately too many prefer simplistic messages aimed at those who already agree with them.
If you want more, read the first dozen or so pieces on my substack, which was all about climate communications and where it should go next.
How do you think your work as a communications professional changed post-COVID?
My biggest change is very simply that it normalised distance-working. I now no longer live in Delft or commute into an office in the Hague to work full time for WRI. I now live in Genoa, both working for WRI and writing from my desk at home. That’s not a very sophisticated answer, but it’s true.
How did you arrive at the idea of your current book? Did your work with think tanks help in any way?
The Netherlands needs explaining because it’s an amazing place, but I found it hard to square climate change impacts like sea level rises and extreme weather with a country that is ⅓ below sea level. It relies on a centuries-old political culture that I thought was fraying (Covid fed into this), and like Singapore it’s a country without much room for getting things wrong. If the Netherlands messes up then in a few decades it’ll be washed into the North Sea. So that’s the book, and it’s built around 10 different walks that show you aspects of the country, from the Delta Works in Zeeland to the bizarre fishing-and-religion semi-island of Urk. My think tank work didn’t really build into it, although it did make me hungry to have more freedom to write and innovate than anybody does within an organisation.
What do you think about the current shape of media in Europe, and the UK? Any podcasts you enjoy?
I’m a big believer in podcasts, but have shied away from daily news in favour of immersing myself far more in background and context. That often means history - like many others I’ve been addicted to The Rest Is History for years - and thinkers who bring new ideas and framing like Tyler Cowen and Adam Tooze. I read The Economist and the Times (of London, not the NYT). I also use my RSS feeds to get deep into areas like aircraft disasters (Admiral Cloudberg’s forensic dissections of crashes), which teaches a lot about systems, human frailty, how solutions are built, and why so many plane crashes are simply ‘controlled flight into terrain’ - in other words the pilots flew into the ground.
Since you worked in the video space in a completely different era, it’d be amazing if we could know more about a couple of your documentaries.
Most of my work was news, so it no longer exists. But I did manage to track down and collect a few of my old BBC radio documentaries at Soundcloud. There’s one from when I spent time in Sierra Leone with a former mercenary; a very prescient one with some hunters talking about how their version of the US didn’t fit with modern American life; and one about Russian aggression through the medium of drinking lots of Georgian wine. They were fun times, and because it was radio it was always just me and a microphone, talking to and engaging with people and their stories.
What’s on your TBR list?
I read a lot of history, often about the Second World War or the 17th century, and books with clever ideas. I’m reading a lot of Dutch stuff at the moment - I’m almost finished a reread of Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash. It’s a brutal story of a shipwreck followed by a mutiny and lots of murders, and is riveting in its portrayal of a very different world. If you don’t know what being ‘broken on a wheel’ means, look it up.
Other recent highlights are Revolusi (David van Reybrouck) about Indonesia’s birth; Best Things First (Bjorn Lomborg) about impact philanthropy’s big priorities; Quint (Robert Lautner), a Jaws prequel; Naples 44 (Norman Lewis) about Naples in 1944 (doh); The Price of Glory (Alistair Horne) about Verdun; The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (Peter Zeihan) about global challenges; and Stalin’s War (Sean McMeekin) about the USSR in the war. All recommended, and there are plenty more. Books are one of the cornerstones of my life.
You brought out a rather comprehensive podcast and newsletter at your previous organisation. Which newsletters do you follow closely?
The main newsletters that I pay to read are Noahpinion and Ed West, and if Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog and Admiral Cloudberg were newsletters, I’d subscribe and happily pay. There are quite a few others that I subscribe to but don’t pay, including the ones from Matt Yglesias, Adam Tooze, and Lawrence and Sam Freedman. I also get most of the Economist’s newsletters, but the best of them are about Europe, Britain, China, and Defence. I’m always checking out new ones and perfectly happy to pay when I get one that suits me.
Are there any other projects in the offing? I mean, after the Ten Walks book.
My real hope is that after ‘Orange Sky, Rising Water’ about the Netherlands, the ‘ten walks explain everything’ treatment can turn into a brand that allows me to build up with more books, videos, audio podcasts, and the substack newsletter. I’ve thought the Italy version through already, and I’m bringing short versions of each walk out on the Substack as we speak. I can see it working really well for Poland too. And not just countries - imagine the ten walks that you would do to explain a concept like the Industrial Revolution. My fingers are crossed that it builds up steam.
What’s the last great book you read, movie you watched?
I recently reread John Keegan’s classic The Face of Battle, about the nuts and bolts of how the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme worked, and it was terrific. As I was also rereading Len Deighton’s superb Bomber at the same time, I’ll throw that in too: it’s an extraordinary multiple-narrative novel about a single bombing raid.
I rewatched Bladerunner 2049 as I travelled back from Washington DC a few weeks ago, and it - like the original Bladerunner - is firmly in my top 5.
What are you currently watching (TV, movie)?
Currently watching: I’m watching Clarkson’s Farm with my family, which does a brilliant job of explaining agriculture as a living, breathing thing to a mass audience. I know a lot of British people hate him, but I think that says more about them and their mood affiliation than it does about him. There is no more gifted TV presenter working in Britain at the moment.
What moves you most in film or books?
I get sentimental about big themes of loss or sacrifice, especially concerning children who were born unlucky. But forgetting about films or books, I saw an entertaining thread on the 50 best moments of the last English football season on Twitter, and two of the short videos almost made me blub. One was about a young Irish guy who was born without arms and fulfilled his dream of making it to a Liverpool match where he burst into tears at the emotion of it all. I’ve seen enough of the world to know that we should wake up and feel lucky every single day. I try to.