Hugo Tagholm

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Hugo Tagholm: I sometimes am conflicted, but less and less so. I really believe to be your most effective professional self you need to be true to yourself in other ways. You need to keep recharging your batteries. And we can’t all keep going forever at the coal face. And so surfing for me and sea swimming are things that inspire me. And it’s funny how surfing, you know, if you sort of go surfing in the day, maybe people have, raise an eyebrow slightly more than if you were to go say for a run at lunchtime or play squash at lunchtime. If you were to go for an hour to go surfing people still go, ‘Ah, can you really do that?’ But, but they would not hesitate to say, ‘Oh that’s great’ if a CEO goes running at lunchtime or goes to the gym. So it’s sort of a funny perception. But I like that too. But I’ve found that, that balance, the yin and the yang of that, that recharging your batteries. And I think, I mean I sort of digress into the sort of not, I mean it’s more sort of the chemical make up of ourselves and how that, how that influences us. I personally think a lot of the challenges we face as leaders, certainly as a leader, certainly because I think in leadership there’s lots of things people don’t understand you face unless you’ve been a leader. There are decisions you make and things you carry that people can’t, can’t recognise until you’ve done it. And I think a lot of the problems we face in life, personal, professional, leadership challenges, are less an external problem than an internal chemistry problem. That your chemistry isn’t quite right and you’ve got too much cortisol in your system, you’ve got too much of the wrong chemicals. You’ve got maybe too many sugars. Maybe you’ve got too much caffeine, whatever it is. Maybe you haven’t eaten, maybe you haven’t got enough sugars. And, and a lot of the sort of art of making the right decisions is about regulating your inner chemistry to be able to do that. You know I know how much better I’ll be as a leader and I’ve always felt this when I’ve been running or done a meditative swim for 1500 metres in the sea before work. Or had a surf. I mean a surf is not as dependable in terms of its chemistry regulation because it can be good and bad. You can be frustrated by one. But if I run for five, six, ten kilometres before work, I know I’ll have a much better day than if I don’t. And actually-Barbara Brayshay: I suppose you get adrenalin hits with the surfing as well.Hugo Tagholm: Yes. But rather than take time I find those things make time. And I think that’s always been useful. So I sort of digressed off the point of like internationally yes, like part of you know going surfing would often be the golf course of what we do I’d, you know, go surfing with other leaders. Sometimes business leaders, sometimes funders. You know people often from a media perspective maybe don’t want to go surfing but might want to walk and talk on the beach. They might want to see me in and around the sea too. And instead of it being a clichéd way, because I don’t pretend to surf. I actually do. And I don’t pretend I’m the best surfer but it is something that is a huge part of my life. And I think that authenticity is really important too in influencing change. Because it’s not, it’s not a joke for me, I genuinely live and breathe the ocean and live around it and base my life around it. And that’s just a fact. And so that’s really important to how I influence because just being, you know, particularly in my new job, they did ask me to move back to London and I was like, I’m not going to do that. I’ll have a London office as well but I’m not going to move back to London. And that is part of my model of activism and influence. And I love and value, as much as I do the coastline, the streets of London and what I need to do in London. But I don’t want to live there in permanence myself anymore.British Library catalogue number: C2037/61 Project clip number: 203