Local

Thank you for all your support this year!
I hope you'll get out and explore your own map too...
For more ideas and info: www.alastairhumphreys.com/local

I am proud to know these familiar little spots, for they have helped me learn to appreciate where I live and feel more attached to it, despite Thoreau’s insistence that a landscape can ‘never become quite familiar to you’, no matter how long you live there.

But can a single map really be enough exploration for a lifetime? Pootling around one map for a year rarely felt like an adventure, I’ll admit. But it did often feel like exploring. I enjoyed many tingles of surprise on my map of small wonders. I won’t push your credulity in claiming it was epic, but something about the experience resonated with the sliver of my soul that wants always to look beyond the hori- zon. My weekly meanderings did a decent job of keeping a lid on that restlessness. So much so, in fact, that I feel something akin to vertigo at contemplating the prospect of having the entire globe to explore.

If you pick up a map of your local area, choose a grid square at ran- dom, and begin walking around it with your eyes open, you’ll soon be mesmerised by the possibilities for local exploration. After that, it is up to you. What will you look for? What will you care about and want to take a stand on?

My map has changed my perception of home, made me less tempt- ed to fly, and more motivated to care for the environment. There is so much potential for a future full of positive stories, if only we demand change and take action.

This local map could fuel my curiosity for ever, in a way I once thought only distant places could do. My map is a fractal of the world. Today is a fractal of my life. To know one place well and to make it better is the work of a lifetime. And so, yes, a single map can be enough.

I cycled to a small town that I knew as a motorway junction and a monstrous snarl of a roundabout. And yet I was riding towards it down pretty lanes fringed with red and yellow leaves that swirled and spun in the wind. It was disorientating not to have thought of this place in this way before. What would I discover on the last of my fifty-two grid squares?

I had spent an entire year on a small map that I’d feared would be boring and meagre. But I saw now that I was nowhere near to know- ing it fully. I would need to continue at the same pace for another seven years before I even visited every square, let alone travelled around each one in each season, during rush hour or at dawn, by bike or on foot, alone or with a companion. You never pass through the same grid square twice. I can never know even one map, not in all its sea- sons and weather, nor all its harvests and wildlife. And I had barely begun on the countless human stories and history intertwined in my nondescript neighbourhood.

I began today’s grid square outside the Duke of Wellington pub, which dated from 1516, two and a half centuries before Old Nosey was born. I thought about all the brawls and laughs it had seen, and the tall tales told by 500 years of drinkers. I pondered also when they’d installed a petanque court in the garden, a game surely more suited to Napoleon than Wellington.

The Duke of Wellington was one of Britain’s greatest military heroes, as well as a Prime Minister. Although he was born way back in 1769, he lived long enough to have his photograph taken, which is impressive considering he was involved in sixty battles. And he is also a legend in the very diverse worlds of rubber boots and beef cooked in pastry.