Lindsay Nicholson had one of the glossiest jobs in British media: editing bestselling women’s magazines, attending A-list parties and sitting front row at fashion shows.
Resilience, reinvention and knowing what readers wanted were the currency of that world. Those skills would prove unexpectedly useful when she became chair of governors at City Lit, guiding the country’s largest adult education institution through a cyberattack and financial crisis.
As editor and later editorial director at Hearst UK in the 1990s and early 2000s, Nicholson oversaw Good Housekeeping during its commercial and cultural peak, a time when women’s magazines were not just widely read but deeply influential as lifestyle guides to the generations of women balancing family life with work outside the home.
“It was the absolute heyday,” she recalls. “Being an editor then really was the best job in the world.”
But as advertising revenue drained from magazines into new social media platforms, many editors found themselves navigating uncertain futures.
When Nicholson lost her job in 2017, she was “relieved, in a way,” she says. “I didn’t have to stay and deal with ever-diminishing budgets. But it was a shock to the system.”
Lindsay Nicholson
A TOT life
While Nicholson’s magazines enticed readers with their gripping ‘TOT’ (triumph over tragedy) features, her own life was unfolding into the ultimate TOT tale.
As she endeavoured to come to terms with the tragic death of her 35-year-old husband, the Observer’s chief reporter John Merritt, in 1998, six years later their nine-year-old daughter Ellie died from the same rare form of blood cancer.
Nicholson had been pregnant with their second child when Merritt died. She named her Hope, and poignantly titled the latest edition of her memoir as How to Survive Losing It All, Without Losing Hope.
It describes the dark moments when the “perfect-bound” pages of her life came undone – interviewing Bon Jovi in New York on the day she discovers a lump that turns out to be stage two breast cancer; being unable to get hold of her dear friend Alastair Campbell upon being placed in a police cell overnight after her then-husband accuses her (wrongly) of domestic violence.
The job she loved became a salvation from her sorrows. Nicholson returned to work (at the time as editor-in-chief of Prima magazine) just two weeks after Ellie’s funeral.
“Losing myself in work for 10 hours a day seemed the only way to survive,” she wrote.
But her life unravelled completely when a devastating car crash prompted PTSD flashbacks and was followed by the loss of her home, her second marriage and the career that defined her. When she came to join the pieces back together again she found purpose and meaning not in status or career, but from her new voluntary roles – including as City Lit’s chair.
The college has had its own TOT journey since Nicholson joined in 2022; still battered from Covid, City Lit experienced a devastating cyberattack in Nicholson’s first week as chair and was sucked into a financial black hole from which it has only recently emerged.
City lit college
Lifelong learning passion
I meet Nicholson by the lifts at City Lit’s campus in Covent Garden. She is wearing a black suit and chunky gold necklace, a throwback to her editing days when she was known for her designer black dresses, statement necklaces and killer heels.
She gestures to the digital screens above our heads that display all the classes being taught in the next hour.
Today, between 2pm and 3pm, there are classes in Italian ‘at a gentle pace’, art and mysticism in 19th and 20th century Europe, Chinese, Japanese, musical theatre dance, Pilates, counselling skills and the global cold war.
Nicholson feels “like a child in a sweet shop” reading those screens.
She dabbled as a learner herself in jewellery and ceramics, although realising that attending these classes was “costing the college more in terms of my cack-handed breaking of equipment”, she switched to ancient Greek and French, which are more in her “comfort zone”.
In her online ancient Greek class, a fellow learner who left school at 16 explained how upon retiring after a lucrative career, he is now “gifting myself the classical education I never had”.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” she muses.
Nicholson is tempted to join a book-binding course. In preparation for writing her own book, she took a master’s in English language and literature/letters at Birkbeck, University of London. She realised upon coming to City Lit that she could have studied similar courses “a lot cheaper” there, but “people don’t always realise” this is possible in FE.
Lindsay Nicholson becoming an Hon Fellow of UCL
Forgotten over-50s
It is Nicholson’s “absolute passion and conviction that learning needs to be lifelong”.
Having seen firsthand how rapid technological change decimated jobs in the magazine publishing world, she firmly believes AI advances mean “the role for adult education is going to be absolutely sharply focused as people who had jobs they thought were for ever lose those jobs”.
She is “surprised and shocked” that the government “haven’t flagged this” issue more, and “AoC haven’t either”.
The government instead prioritised getting young people into training and work, with its youth guarantee and recent funding changes to the apprenticeships system. And London mayor Sadiq Khan is diverting £9 million of the Greater London Authority’s adult skills fund (ASF) reserves to support young NEETs instead.
While Nicholson believes the problem of rising numbers of young NEETs is “huge”, she is concerned there is “no focus” on the roughly 4 million economically inactive 50 to 64 year olds.
It is a “real tragedy” that some over-50s are lost to the workforce because they were not given the opportunity to retrain and adapt to technological changes.
Unlike with young NEETs, older cohorts are “already in the mindset of going to work”, and are often more adept at punctuality and soft skills.
“There’s a lot that could be done quite cost-effectively to keep them in work or get them thinking up their own business ideas. It’s baffling sometimes that that doesn’t seem to be a priority for anyone.”
Tight margins
With government funding slowly draining from adult education, many of the sector’s institutions have been left battling to survive.
Of City Lit’s London counterparts, the government has issued a financial notice to improve to Richmond and Hillcroft Adult and Community College, the Mary Ward Centre is restructuring and Redbridge Institute of Adult Education has scaled back in-person provision.
City Lit has so far avoided having to make substantial cutbacks by broadening its commercial offer. Half its income is from private fees.
But while fees can cover the running of classes, “they don’t cover the cost of keeping the lifts running in between the courses”, says Nicholson.
Her board has considered encouraging the learners themselves to write to the government as part of its determined efforts to lobby for better funding. With grant funding down £600,000 year on year, this year’s outlook is “difficult”.
The college is operating to a “very tight margin” and “can’t afford to make mistakes”, she says.
Lindsay Nicholson with Dame Mary Berry for Good Housekeeping magazine
The stroppy teen
Nicholson’s work ethic and passion for adult education were moulded from growing up seeing her mother and father (who left school at 16 and 14) attending evening classes so they could embark on new careers later in life.
Her father worked as a local newspaper reporter before becoming a barrister, while her mother trained to become a teacher.
They were determined for their daughter to make the most of educational opportunities while she was still young. But being a “stroppy teenager”, she put little effort into considering her future – opting to study astrophysics at University College London (UCL) simply because it was near the top of the alphabetical list of subjects.
“The joke was on me when I got there and found it’s really quite difficult,” she admits.
But Nicholson found her forte editing the student newspaper in the days of heady student activism. Her standout moment was producing a special edition while occupying Senate House of the University of London, which was “way more exciting than astrophysics”.
Years later, while covering women in science topics at Good Housekeeping, she reflected on how challenging it had been to be one of only a few female students on a heavily male-dominated course. Her words struck a chord, prompting Nicholson to help spearhead a campaign for women in science. As a result, she was invited back to UCL in 2014 as a member of its council, marking the start of her education governance career.
Eight years later, Nicholson was promoted to become one of UCL’s senior appointed officers (the equivalent of a vice chair).
Assuming that HE and FE governance would be similar, Nicholson was “unprepared” for the “huge” cultural differences between them when she started at City Lit.
As well as having to be Ofsted inspected, colleges’ grant funding structures require a “completely different relationship” with the government.
“Universities are pretty much a law unto themselves, within the guidelines of the Office for Students – HE is much less regulated”, she says.
Lindsay Nicholson, outside City Lit
The attack
Although City Lit had been brought under FE commissioner intervention in early 2022, when Nicholson joined in December of that year she assumed, given the college had experienced incremental growth until just before the pandemic, that it would bounce back.
It was not to be. On her first day as chair, she was informed of a devastating cyberattack. She barely knew what one was at the time.
“How are we ever going to crawl out of this hole?” she wondered.
The cyberattack knocked out the college’s phones for two months and courses had to be cancelled because of the difficulty of collecting fees.
The reclassification of colleges into the public sector meant City Lit had to replace its Barclays borrowing with a Treasury loan at the same time as its phones and website were still down.
Making that change then was “really difficult”.
Being Ofsted inspected within six months of Nicholson joining was an “absolute baptism of fire”, but its ‘outstanding’ outcome has put the college on a firmer footing.
In her first year in post, Nicholson worked full-time hours while she got to grips with the complexities of FE governance and cybersecurity. The college emerged from financial intervention in March 2025, and now it is relatively “back to normal”. She is grateful she has been able to reduce her hours to just over a day a week.
Lindsay Nicholson with Joan Collins for Good Housekeeping
Editing skills
Nicholson claims her talents as an editor are the same attributes she draws upon now as chair; bringing the experts together in a “harmonious way”, rather than being an expert yourself in an area, which can “unbalance” a publication.
Nicholson modestly claims that fashion was never her “forte”.
At Good Housekeeping, she always imagined a composite reader – “Claire”, a part-time GP juggling family responsibilities, short on time but determined to “live her best life”, and edited every feature with her in mind.
That instinct for her audience and anticipating their needs proved just as valuable in reflecting on the learners in FE governance.
And a good journalist, like a good governor, should also never be shy in admitting when they need something explained a second time.
Unfortunately, FE governance does not, she concedes, involve as many champagne receptions as her former role did.
She also gained notoriety as an editor for setting her Good Housekeeping team to work road-testing sex toys, and for persuading the then media-shy Cherie Blair to guest edit Prima in the run-up to the 1997 election.
Nicholson’s book also describes her dashing for an emergency hair appointment after being accidentally drenched by fire sprinklers, just before interviewing then prime minister Tony Blair.
Many of her magazines’ stories were about boosting confidence for what Nicholson terms “grown-up women”, at a time when “women were expected to fall off a cliff” when they hit 40. She saw her task as being to convince advertisers that older women had disposable income and “could not be ignored any longer”.
Money talks
In terms of her own disposable income, Nicholson is not paid for her role at City Lit, but she sees a case for remunerating governors to bring in voices from different backgrounds.
“More and more responsibility is being placed on them, and they’re having to work for longer,” she says. “Actually, I don’t think you want a board entirely made up of people who are comfortably off enough not to have to work.”
But there are many perks of the role that more than make up for the lack of pay.
While her days of interviewing top celebs may be over, she gets to meet some fascinating people who deliver talks at the college, including Tom Fletcher, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, and the artist Grayson Perry. She also loves seeing Dame Evelyn Glennie, the patron of City Lit’s learning disabled orchestra, performing with them. “It just blows your mind,” she says.
Her role gives her the chance to “nourish my brain in important ways”.
Nicholson laments in her book how, as an editor, in her “quest for endless new angles on promoting self-acceptance”, she never suggested that her readers should find “unpaid charitable work”.
“Confidence, that holy grail of my banner coverlines, turns out to be an inside job… slowly I start to understand that volunteering beats the hell out of repeating positive affirmations or finding a flattering haircut.”
Lindsay Nicholson receiving her MBE