My friend Mathew Frith, an urban nature conservationist, who has died aged 64 from a glioblastoma (brain tumour), was best known for his work in London, but leaves a national legacy of championing urban nature, pioneering citizen science, saving wildlife sites from development, and improving public access to green space.
In 1989 he joined the staff of the London Wildlife Trust, a charity founded on a vision for a greener, more inclusive city. As warden of Sydenham Hill Wood from 1990 to 1995, Mathew managed volunteers and learned how an urban woodland “works”.
In 2000 he became urban adviser at English Nature, then joined the government’s influential Urban Green Spaces Taskforce, and revised the national standards for equal access to green spaces. In 2002, he joined the Peabody Trust, where he co-founded Neighbourhoods Green, a landmark £15.6m programme to improve life for its residents across 70 housing estates.
Drawn back to LWT in 2009, he served successively as director of policy and research, deputy chief executive and director of conservation. He lectured at UCL Birkbeck, and advised the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the Green Flag scheme, and the mayor of London’s Rewilding Taskforce. He was a fellow of the Linnean Society, a member of the Chartered Institute of Ecology & Environmental Management, and a member of the Society for the Environment. Mathew was appointed MBE in 2023 for services to the natural environment.
He was born in Purley, Surrey, to Margaret (nee Searle) and Edward, an insurance underwriter, and grew up in south Croydon with his siblings, Toby and Penny. He went to Trinity school of John Whitgift in Croydon, having won a scholarship at 11-plus. Early childhood involved watching butterflies emerge from pupae hanging from the lid of the family television – and exploring the “cool, chalky, hazelnut-covered” Croham Hurst Woods.
Mathew studied zoology at the University of Exeter (1979-82), but was disenchanted with what he considered its “reductionist” approach, and instead turned to music. While touring as a guitarist with the rock band Loop in 1988-89, he was known for disappearing in search of dragonflies. A self-confessed “failed rock star”, he then found his way back to nature with a job at the Greater London council’s ecology unit.
He believed nature conservation was “a political act”. He railed against the “deserts” of London’s green belt, and fought to protect wildlife-rich sites such as Hutchinson’s Bank in Croydon. Other places that benefited from his campaigns included Woodberry Wetlands in Hackney – opened by David Attenborough in 2016 – and his beloved Croham Hurst.
Mathew was as devoted to the ordinary as the rare – delighting in magpies, and discovering Impatiens frithii, a plant endemic to highland Cameroon. His idiosyncratic style – white clothes, bangles and rings, changing hairstyles and calligraphic postcards – was matched by his wit, kindness and energy. Lately, he had been honing his uniquely florid prose via an MA in nature and travel writing at the University of Bath.
Mathew met Keren Protheroe at a Christmas craft fair, and they married in 2011. She survives him, along with Penny and Toby.
