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Nicholas Albery (1948-2001)
Nicholas Albery Foundation© The Times Thursday June 7 2001 Leading light of Alternative London in the Sixties, who spent the next three decades trying to make life - and death - better for everyone. Nicholas Albery, social inventor, was born on July 28, 1948. He died on June 3, 2001, aged 52. Nicholas Albery was one of the counter-culture whose sense of mission to improve the world carried over into the ensuing decades.
From his home in Cricklewood, an oasis of serenity off a busy high street, he ran the 'Institute for Social Inventions' (publishing a regular guidebook to 'The World's Best Ideas') and the 'Natural Death Centre', which published guidelines to organizing individually-designed funerals, particularly woodland burials using cardboard coffins.
He also published the 'Time Out Book of Country Walks', and the enormously popular anthology 'Poem for the Day', of which he had just finished supervising a new edition last week. It is an unhappy irony that having so long campaigned for walking, cycling and more society-friendly alternatives to the car, and never having learnt to drive, Albery should be killed in a car accident.
He was born to Sir Donald Albery, the theatre-owning impresario, and his second wife Heather. He was educated at 'Stowe', whore he shone in sport and academically, winning a scholarship at 16 to read English at 'St John's College, Oxford'. He dropped out after two years and took the hippy trail to Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, where he was, of course, introduced to hallucinogenic drugs.
When he got back in 1968, his Old Stoic contemporary Tony Elliott was founding 'Time Out' magazine; and John Hopkins was setting up 'BIT', the information and agitprop arm of the hippy newspaper 'International Times'.
Albery went to work' at 'BIT', and met Nicholas Saunders (né Carr-Saunders), founder and author of 'Alternative London', who became his mentor and closest friend. Together 'the two Nicks' and their friend Heathcote Williams the playwright ruled the Hare Krishna-chanting, peace and love-professing 1960s Underground movement, sharing ideas of how communities could take control of their own lives. Of the two Nicks, Saunders was the sharper entrepreneur, reclaiming old 'Covent Garden' warehouses and setting up 'Neal's Yard', the wholefood company.
In 1972 Albery met Josefine Speyer, an art student from Berlin, and later they travelled around Wales in a horse-drawn caravan, during which time their son Merlyn was born on a farm. Later they took over one of a row of Victorian cottages in Freston Road, Notting Hill, threatened with demolition and inhabited by an international coterie of artists and drug addicts; they renamed it 'The People's Republic of Frestonia' and later it became the foundation of the 'Notting Hill Housing Trust'.
In 1979 Albery brought a lawsuit - unsuccessful but prescient - against 'BP' and 'Shell' for their negligence of children's health by using high levels of lead in their petrol. He also stood for the 'Ecology Party' in Kensington and Chelsea, polling 700 votes, including one officially spoiled paper which the returning officer allowed because it carried a heart encircling his name. At the age of 28 he published his autobiography, 'Rehearsal for the Year 2000'.
In 1989 Albery's father died while living abroad. With Sir Donald's legacy, Albery and Josefine (by now his wife) bought the Cricklewood house, formerly an art gallery, to be the base for his society-improving organisations, beginning with the 'Institute for Social Inventions', whose patrons include Fay Weldon, Anita Roddick, Edward de Bono and the musician Brian Eno. 'The World's Best Ideas' became its compendium of suggestions from all over the world to make life, work and health better for everyone.
From Josefine's work as a psychotherapist, and from Albery's own feelings about his father's cremation, there emerged the 'Natural Death Centre', set up with the help of £3000 from the 'Gulbenkian Foundation'. This rewarded sensitive, 'green' undertakers, set up 'midwives for the dying' to comfort the terminally ill and their carers, and advised the public who, Albery realised, were increasingly dissatisfied with conventional funerals.
The centre encourages people to seek undertakers willing to conduct inexpensive, environmentally friendly burials on woodland sites, using individually designed hardboard or wicker coffins. Ralph Fiennes' mother, Mo Mowlam's mother and Barbara Cartland have been among those whose burials were conducted according to holistic principles; and the conservationist David Bellamy has written that he too wishes to be buried on a 'Church of England' woodland site "where I hope to grow into a tree which will one day be made into a beautiful piece of furniture."
Albery called woodland burial the fastest growing environmental movement in Britain. And every year he would hold a 'Day of the Dead' ceremony where people could light cand1es and talk together about those they had loved and lost.
In the 1960s, Albery had personified the spirit of the times: handsome, tall, lean, with long flowing locks and a kaftan. More recently, though by now short-haired, he remained a gentle, serene and quietly-spoken person who glowed with religious fervour when speaking about his personal passions. A potentially debilitating spinal condition turned him into a devotee of a starch-free diet and of morning exercises (conducted naked, to soft music) as well as a devout walker.
He preferred not to walk alone, so he organised a 'Saturday morning Walkers' Club', devising walks in the Home Counties every weekend which he took without fail (once ploughing through snow up to his hips) and publishing the exact routes in 'The Time Out Book of Country Walks'. This Saturday's walk is from Otford to Eynsford, taking in two castles and Lullingstone's Roman villa.
Similarly, his dedication to learning a poem every day developed into the anthology 'Poem for the Day: 366 poems worth learning by heart' - a volume used daily by the current Archbishop of Canterbury. Every year on 'National Poetry Day' Albery also organised reciting competitions in London. He researched each poem, and had only last week learnt Edna St Vincent Millais' 'Fatal Interview XLVII'.
Fittingly, his own funeral will take place on private woodland given to him by Nicholas Saunders as a wedding present. Saunders was coincidentally also killed in a car crash in South Africa two years ago.
So Saunders and Albery, 'the two Nicks' who pioneered the urban counterculture 30 years ago, will lie c1ose to one another on a Berkshire hillside.
Nicholas Albery is survived by his wife and son.
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