I grew up in a village in East Yorkshire and despite my youthful need to escape it in search of big-city glory, I now find myself increasingly idealising that upbringing. Where your world is small and you feel enormous within it, revelling in a kind of inflated innocence that allows you freedom to roam and dream.
Yet, when I reflect on it, I’ve always created a small sense of community wherever I’ve been in London, which has afforded that exact same feeling.
My gauche Bethnal Green years in cafes and temp jobs were followed by the debauched Camden years in bars and gainful employment, then the spiralling Dalston years where crisis points accumulated, all before the settling Nunhead years with children.
Every Londoner has a different path through the city that carries memories of relationships or jobs, but the path often is simply the result of moving to a place, around which you then build your ‘new’ identity — one reflected by the ‘new’ people around you.
The instinct to be part of a community is perhaps never more important than when we’re pin-balling around a big city. As Charlotte Duck’s feature this week shows, we either seek out other locals or people with whom we share interests.
One of the best things I ever did in this sense was get a dog. At a particularly low point, just being forced to chat to other dog-walkers made a huge difference. We want that village-y feel, we need it for our mental health in fact, and while that might mean heading to lovely London locales like Richmond, most often we find our own tribes and remake that feeling for ourselves.
