Celebrating Local Distinctiveness
This book is about the extraordinary richness of our everyday surroundings; the landscapes, buildings, people and wildlife that give meaning to the places we know.
It is about the commonplace; for us to value it, a creature does not have to be endangered, a building does not have to be monumental, a prospect does not have to be breathtaking. A place may not even be 'ours' for us to feel attached to it. We just need to know something of it; it has to mean something to us.
Everywhere is somewhere. What makes each place unique is the conspiracy of nature and culture; the accumulation of story upon history upon natural history.
At Common Ground we have forged the idea of local distinctiveness to embody this concept.
It is a dynamic thing, constantly evolving as places change — it is not about preserving the status quo, creating a frozen moment — and it includes the invisible as well as the visible: symbols, festivals and legends stand alongside hedgerows, hills and houses.
Rather than a gazetteer of places, we have focused on aspects of locality — archaeology, architecture, landscape, language, food, folklore, events, engineering — that interact with one another at the level of the street, the neighbourhood, the parish. We offer a way of looking that has universal potential, but is best done on an intimate scale.
Why A to Z?
The alphabet helps us to break some conventions; it liberates us from classifying things, from following history as an arrow through time, from organising hierarchies. It shuffles and juxtaposes in ways that surprise. This can change what we see, make things we take for granted seem new to us; it may encourage us into action.
We hope this book helps you to look at your own place, to see it through new eyes, to cherish it and to take it into your own hands.
The land is our great creation. Underpinned by nature, it is a physical thing and an invisible web. It is held together by stone walls and swallows, Northumbrian smallpipes and Swaledale sheep, Devon lanes and Fenland skies, Diwali and 'obby osses, round barrows and cooling towers, high streets and Ham stone, dew ponds and dialects.
Sometimes we forget that our everyday surroundings are nature's greatest store, history's biggest library. The filigree of rich understandings between people and the land is not about scenery. It takes us below the surface, to where the land might reflect back to us purpose and belonging.
The land harbours thousands of stories that have never been written down: tales of daily lives and struggles to find water, win stone, grow food, help neighbours, fight enemies, hold back tides, survive disease.
The land and its secrets are both robust and vulnerable. After surviving for four thousand years, subtle aspects of a farm's history can be all but erased in one afternoon of deep ploughing. The alignment of a new bypass, which may help a village to breathe again, can cause a stream to be banished, culverted, burying the very reason why the village established itself there. The stealing of a market-place to make a car park in the centre of town may deny people a place to meet and shop, to exchange news and gossip, to mark the seasons with festivals.
Stories are the currency of ordinary history. Small details spark the telling — a line of trees, the shape of a roof, the name of a street. They help us to share knowledge of what makes a place. We are all familiar with our own fragments of geography: places where we live, work, visit. We mostly take them for granted, but their significance lies in their very ordinariness to us.
Differentiating the ordinary demands close observation, cherishing the locally typical, allowing professional expertise and indigenous knowledge to inform one another.
A greater care for local distinctiveness could help us to reinvigorate our sense of belonging.
Scale is important, as is the question of who defines it. We are talking of a fineness of grain — the neighbourhood, the locality, the parish, the housing estate, the village, the suburb, perhaps even the street, as defined by those who live and work and play there.
These are the areas to which people feel they belong, or which they have chosen and are attached to. At Common Ground we are concerned not with regional diversity but with local distinctiveness. When things are looked at on a larger scale, sensitivity is lost. People become 'the public'; streets and fields become 'sites'; woods and streams become 'natural resources'. These abstractions render professionals forgetful of lives, livelihoods and places.
'Regions' are generally defined from the outside in; they are about form and function; they are academic, institutional or political creations. Locality needs to be defined from within.
The Chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot asked 'How long is the coast of Britain?', asserting that any answer would be dependent upon the distance from which the measurement was taken. Someone measuring from a satellite map would give a much smaller figure than someone walking every inlet. For a snail every pebble would add to the length.
The gauge matters.
While we have made the world smaller with trains, boats, planes, cars and elevators, we still have to pace most of our activities to our own size and our own walking. It is at this scale and speed that we see and savour most.
Distinctiveness is not the same as diversity, for it involves much more than variety.
Strict edges rarely exist between places, other than at the coast or where there is a dramatic change in geology. One place ends gradually, as another begins. In biology the place where two ecosystems overlap — the ecotone — supports a variety of species that is often richer than in the habitats it buffers. Similarly, in a town, some streets may be dominated by small Indian shops and others by big chain stores, but the area of greatest fascination may well be the back lanes where they meet.
Geologists are excited by unconformity; archaeologists tell the time by reading the overlaps — parish boundaries lining up along a Roman road, which itself cuts across older field systems.
Local distinctiveness is not served well by simple preservation of the status quo; like nature it needs flux, but that is not to say that some things will not persist for a long time.
Just as nature is always experimenting, a locality, too, must be open to change, permeable to new people, ideas, buildings, plantings. But change may enrich or it may deplete, and richness is under siege. Mass production, fashion, increased mobility and forceful promotion of corporate identity have brought us uniform shop fronts, farm buildings, factories, forests and front doors. Intensive farming has created a bland, unfriendly countryside. New estates offer the 'Cheviot' or the 'Mayfair' house in any part of England.
The differences that places show are just the first glimpse of richness. Little things (detail) and clues to previous lives and landscapes (patina) may be the very things that breathe significance into the streets or fields. So much surveying, fact-gathering, analysis and policy-making leaves out the very things that make us love a place.
We can pick out a face in a football crowd, see a tiny bird high up in a tree of a hundred thousand leaves, place a beer by its taste and sneeze at things we cannot even smell.
Detail informs our lives. Whatever our work or pleasures, our attention and affections are held by small complications and intricacies. We thrive on gossip, the delicacy of flowers, the differences between bricks and concrete.
In Australia vast areas may seem to look the same, but the cultured eye sees minute detail. Water can be found from the subtlest constellation of clues, stories cling to small marks on rocks, and the slightest rise can be a landmark for miles.
We are emotional, subjective beings with memories and imagination; we are provoked to reverie by the smallest of things. We often know and feel things for which words cannot be found, despite having one of the richest languages in the world. We have a much greater capacity to see than we have to describe. Hence people sense when something has gone from their local scene, but cannot articulate it. It could be summer silence where swifts once filled the sky; it could be the displacement of a family firm by a chain store.
Just as Thomas Hardy talks of divining the shape of a mountain in the dark by the absence of stars, we recognise where we are through many different cues, and often we sense what is there through something else. Ecologists use the term 'indicator species': dog's mercury suggests ancient woodland. Geologists (following aboriginal practice) recognise the presence of certain minerals by the plants growing above the ground: sandwort is known as leadwort in Derbyshire, Lancashire and Cheshire. Pollution and lichen experts read sulphur dioxide in the absence of Lobaria pulmonaria and Usnea articulata. We can see the winter salt line along roadsides in Huntingdonshire by the summer flowering of sea spurrey. A Warwickshire gate lets us know subliminally that we are not in Gloucestershire.
The invisible often has to be 'seen' through the visible. Original attempts to map climate had to rely upon patterns read from vegetation. Only when wind and temperature could be monitored by scattered weather stations and at altitude did scientists find evidence of what people already knew. The earlier fall of leaves at the bottom of a small valley murmurs 'frost pocket'. The field persisting at the centre of a village whispers 'festival'.
History is often pieced together by detective work from footprints and stories. There is much non-verbal communication between us and a place we know. As well as responding to the obvious, we identify signs, clues, traces, suggestions, intimations, and they gather further richness through juxtaposition. Colours look different according to their neighbours. We need the nourishment of detail — in things as ordinary as rumples in a field, the shape of a gable end, seasonal goods in the market — to stimulate our senses.
Places remain vital through absorption and reinvention. In Northamptonshire compare a deep-ploughed field of a hundred acres with ten fields of ten acres. Read the richness in the latter — perhaps medieval ridge and furrow overlaid with Enclosure hedgerows, never ploughed or strewn with herbicide or fertiliser. Go to the East End of London and compare a sixties, seventies or eighties estate with the Huguenot buildings, bagel shops and Bangladeshi restaurants of Brick Lane and the mosque in an old synagogue that was once a chapel. Local distinctiveness must be about history continuing through the present, not about the past.
The crude sacrifices made by comprehensive and rapid change demean us. We can add without brutalism. Dynamism and vitality should be great allies of local distinctiveness.
Attempts to arrest both progress and decay in a Cotswold village or in culturally diverse Leicester risk the danger of creating a frozen moment, the real place and people having sunk below waves of preciousness or poverty. We must hold on to most of the old while demanding the best of the new.
Why is it important that Wensleydale cheese continues to be made in this valley and not the next? Among the economic reasons, there is also an understanding that the cows and sheep of this place, eating grass in this valley, with expertise built here over generations, combine to create a food that reflects and reinforces identity. Its production brings dignity and pride to the place, since the people who make it are experts, as are the people who grow the grass to feed the animals. At its best the place that is created and sustained by this activity is one in which mixed grass, wildflowers and barns have real jobs, as do the people.
The French have made a profession out of the particular: terroir carries kudos, binding together identity, place and quality. Appellation contrôlée ensures that the place of origin is known and important. Trace elements can make the difference between good and better, and the educated nose can tell.
A Somerset hedge laid in a Midland pattern, a Bakewell pudding made with almond essence, Far from the Madding Crowd filmed in France: these things fall short. We are deprived by the ersatz, the kitsch, the substitute.
The packaging of history as 'heritage' to create brands, such as Brontë Country, degrades cultural complexity. It should be perfectly possible to reinforce the medieval 'feel' of York, the Orwell connections in Wigan, Lancashire, without reducing places to stage sets, someone's idea of the past, tourist destinations, one-dimensional and unsatisfying.
Local distinctiveness is not necessarily about beauty, but it must be about truth.
The unusual, the special, the idiosyncratic or the rare may be important factors in giving a place a sense of itself — the fortifications, the football team, the fritillaries, the fair. But identity is not bound up only in the symbolism of features and festivals. It is the commonplace that defines — the locally abundant plants, the specific wall-building methods, the accents and dialects — the context that exerts the binding force.
Cottages exhibit vernacular responses to climate, materials and need. The identity of Georgian houses great and small lies in their recognisable similarity of form, function and façade, based upon proportional rules. But they are never the same. Their differences lie in their relations to the land and to one another, their places in the social hierarchy, their original tasks (workers' houses in Barnsbury, north London; aristocratic residences in the Royal Crescent, Bath), their materials (grey-gold limestone in Stamford, Lincolnshire; red brick in Nottinghamshire).
While all leaves do the same basic jobs, they have developed drip tips, hairs and so on to adapt to local conditions. The demands of photosynthesis and family evolution do not sacrifice individuation. All species produce different kinds of leaves, and leaves vary on the same tree.
It is salutary to recall that 'utopia' means nowhere. The philosophising that builds the ideal usually imagines that nothing has been there before, and that life and culture will thereafter evolve no further.
Knowledge, new ideas and wisdom must be shared. The tumbleweed expertise of the professional, learnt and practised elsewhere; the fresh cultural eye of the incomer; the local wisdom of the indigene, amassed through generations: all have different aspects of perception to offer.
This implies a radical shift in the way in which we plan and prognosticate, towards a more responsive, detailed way of changing things.
The forces of homogenisation rob us of both tangible and invisible things that have meaning to us; they erase the fragments from which we piece together stories of nature and history, they stunt our sensibilities and starve our imaginations. And, as Gaston Bachelard has said, 'If we cannot imagine, we can't foresee.' Our interest in local distinctiveness incorporates a profound concern for our common future.
Nature will endure whatever our actions bring. It is we who are in danger. We deprive ourselves of a rich life. We need to live better with the world, and it is our ordinary actions that will be our salvation or our downfall. To ground ourselves, understand our place, find meaning and take steps to cherish and enrich our own patch of land demands that we change our ways, share our knowledge, get involved. We have to know what is of real value to us, where we are, and find new ways of belonging.
Sue Clifford & Angela King
Shaftesbury, Dorset
January 2006
This essay introduces England in Particular by Sue Clifford and Angela King (Common Ground, 2006). Read more at commonground.org.uk.