My friend and colleague Nick Reeves, who has died aged 60 after a stroke, was one of the most considered and forthright voices in the environmental sector.
As executive director from 1998, he led the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management with distinction at a time when perceptions of environmental management and its impact on the planet were undergoing radical change. Under his leadership, CIWEM evolved from a traditional professional body dedicated to the interests of the engineering and water sectors into an innovative organisation that looks to its environmental remit as its driving force.
The son of an artist, Philip Reeves, and his wife, Rachel (nee Rivers), Nick had a lifelong interest in art and design. Having studied at the Slade school of art, London, where Lucian Freud was one of his tutors and David Hockney an acquaintance, Nick developed a passion for the impact and the principles of surrealism and the Dadaist movement. "Marcel Duchamp," he wrote in an article for the Leisure Review, "was my downfall and ended any thoughts I had of serious art practice."
After leaving art school he worked as a landscape designer and as head of environment and recreation with Broxbourne borough council, Hertfordshire, before joining the Institute of Leisure and Amenity Management in the early 1990s as policy director and subsequently deputy director. However, he remained an artist at heart, exhibiting his work and selling a number of drawings and paintings in aid of Shelter.
Over the last few years Nick had committed a lot of time to the development of CIWEM's new headquarters at Saffron Hill in central London and he was particularly excited that the building will have its own gallery space.
Given the vast number of honours, awards and accolades that Nick received – among them appointment as OBE in 2011, fellowships of the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of Horticulture, as well as a freedom of the City of London – he was perhaps an unlikely radical, but he was serious and highly knowledgable about the politics and the history of liberty and dissent. It was his passion for political debate, closely married to his love of conviviality and a good lunch, that led him to form the John Wilkes Society dining club, a forum in which every possible topic was examined but always with laughter as an accompaniment.
Nick is survived by his wife, Janet, whom he married in 2001, and by two daughters and two stepchildren.