Nick Wates is an author specialising in community engagement in placemaking. His first book was The Battle for Tolmers Square, his most recent The Community Planning Handbook based on experience during the intervening years as a practitioner helping communities all over the UK and abroad plan improvements to their neighbourhoods. For these books and others he was awarded a PhD by Publication in 2020 from the University of Brighton.

Nick squatted in Tolmers Square in 1973 after studying across the Euston Road at the School of Environmental Studies, University College London. He became the first coordinator of the Tolmers Village Association, and was actively involved with, and chronicled, the Tolmers development saga during the 1970s. After leaving Tolmers in 1979 he moved to Limehouse with Caroline Lwin and had two children, Mae and Max, before moving to Hastings where he now lives with partner Jane Freund.