Tom Fort was education at Eton and Balliol Collge, Oxford. On leaving Oxford he went to work as a reporter at the Slough Observer and the Slough Evening Mail before joining the BBC in 1978 where he worked in the BBC Radio newsroom in London for 22 years. He took early retirement in 2000, just before the publication of his social history of lawns and lawn-mowing, The Grass is Greener.