​President: Nicholas Crane
A Fellow for over 30 years, Nicholas has made a life from geography.
As a young geography graduate, Nicholas Crane helped to create an award-winning national cycling network that became the subject of his first book. Since then he has written another 10 books and presented over 80 geographically-related BBC radio documentaries and films, including Coast, Map Man, Great British Journeys, Britannia and Town. He is a recipient of the Society's Ness Award and RSGS Mungo Park Medal.
Nicholas is a former Council member of the Society, has served on the management committee of the Society of Authors and as a Vice President of CPRE, has raised money and awareness through expeditions in Africa and Asia for Intermediate Technology (now Practical Action) and has worked for Afghanaid on a field project in the Hindu Kush. With his cousin, Dr Richard Crane, Nicholas was the first to reach the Pole of Inaccessibility in central Asia, and first to walk the 10,000-kilometre mountain watershed of Europe, a solo expedition that led to Clear waters rising, which won the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award.
Nicholas has supported the Society’s work with the public, schools and expeditions significantly in recent years. He is also an active scholar and his research projects include the first major biography of the 16th-century cartographer, Gerardus Mercator. Nicholas has recently published a 12,000-year historical geography of Britain, The making of the British landscape.