Northward
Before moving North my wife and I took a roadtrip around a few places in Yorkshire that ticked our boxes for a relocation from London. We knew the basics of what we wanted: good beer, good coffee, good food, a train station, a cinema, and a sense of community that you only seem to ever hear other people talk about. It hadn’t originally be the intention to move North, but after exploring all over the country, it was the North that kept calling to us.
A precariously balanced natural stone formation set in a clearing amidst dry grass and bare trees beneath an overcast sky. The image has a slightly unnatural, almost monochrome palette of bronze, brown, and grey. In the background there are other rocks, but our attention is drawn to the central structure; the base is small, no wider than an average person, but balanced atop is a large form reminiscent of a stack of pebbles, or a lonely cairn for giants. The formation is easily the height of three people.
iPhone 15 Pro, Halide Process Zero, 24mm ƒ1.8
Our first stay of the trip was in a hotel that looked out over the Pennines. It was a shabby affair, with closed off events spaces and the odd fixture dangling by its cables from the ceiling. Our room smelled like a mix of cigarettes and Pears soap, having apparently never been fumigated since the “No Smoking” sign had first been slapped on the door.
These sound like negative impressions, but the stay wasn’t a negative. That shabbiness was an amalgam, an after image of the place itself, and it could be felt everywhere: in the hundreds of suitcase wheels that had left scrapes and marks on the skirting boards; in the beer-glass-ringed and chipped-varnish dining room tables, shuffled around so everyone could get a good view of the TV; in the empty cabinets and wobbly shelves weighed down by years of razors and toothbrushes and shower gels and bars of soap, creaking forward with split laminate vertices; and in the awkwardly placed bright street lamps that leaked in through the thin bedroom curtains, that as the sky fell dark, would blend with the howling sunset.
Wear and tear is the memory of a place, the culmination of its years of use, of the people who have been through it. A place without memory is desolation, it is an absence and a loneliness of a distinctly modern kind. It’s memory that makes a place feel like home, for better or for worse.
Anyway, there weren’t any bedbugs, which was really the only bar I needed the place to pass.
A minimalist photo looking up at the sky through the gap between two large rocks. The stone has lines worn into it by the wind and ancient waters, carving a fingerprint of grooves. The image is in black and white. No detail is visible in the sky, it is a pure white, emphasising the texture and form of the rocks.
iPhone 15 Pro, Halide Process Zero, 24mm ƒ1.8
On each visit to a new place we would consult a large spreadsheet, a list of aspects and the facets of those places we wanted to meet our criteria, the things we wanted to come with us so that a new place wouldn’t feel quite so new. The spreadsheet had a score associated with each, out of five, that would be tallied and weighted to provide an overall score for each village or city or town. There’s nothing that can’t be solved or eased with an abundance of planning and administrative effort, right?
On the third day of the trip, we visited a town that had come out pretty low in the spreadsheet-of-power’s ranking. Our previous destination hadn’t felt quite right, despite a high score on the spreadsheet, and so we found ourselves with a morning to spare before moving on. We had breakfast in this low-scoring place, we walked around the town, had a drink at the pub, and when it came time to move on...we didn’t want to.
Much like the hotel, which despite any objective shortcomings felt inviting and warm and comfortable as a result of its particular harmony of blemish and imperfection, so did this place, which once stood in it, just felt right. To compare it to the hotel is unfair; the town is objectively lovely in most ways, and did tick a number of those all important spreadsheet boxes, but it wasn’t meant to. The scores I’d filled out and research I’d done on the computer back in London had marked this place as not worth visiting, and yet we were there, in it. Loving it.
A dark view down a worn path into a clearing. Wan golden light just kisses the edges of the rocks that are strewn about the place, rendering the surrounding areas in darkness. A path crosses ours just ahead carving another unseen route between towering rocks and more scattered boulders. Just visible against the shadowy background are a pair of skeletal trees.
iPhone 15 Pro, Halide Process Zero, 77mm ƒ2.8
Our trip continued for a few more days, but it was that eagerly-rejected town that kept calling to us. It became its own benchmark, the place that all the other places were being compared to.
As we drove back south we took a night’s break from the drive in Leicester. We didn’t explore the city, that wasn’t the point, but we did stay in a hotel that was, objectively, on every level, the nicest place of the trip: modern design and amenities, complete buffet breakfast with tea and coffee, attentive staff and secure keycard entry systems. But it felt empty, desolate, cold. It didn’t feel lived-in, or like anyone had ever loved being there. It felt like a place that people took stops in, picked it because it was near the motorway or the train station, people like us.
Did the hotel adopt that atmosphere because of the kinds of people it catered to, or did it cater for those kinds of people because of that atmosphere?
Hours passed and the road brought us closer to the city. Countryside and fields were broken by buildings and industry, trees disappeared and gave way to knots of motorways that tangled with each other on the path into the capital. The air thickened, the sky darkened, the crowds grew denser, and the traffic slowed.
A cinematic wide-shot of the Yorkshire Dales landscape is shown in gentle hues of blue and brown. We are looking out from a high vantage, across rolling fields and hills. The fields are dotted by a sparse scattering of trees. In the centre of the image is a strange swipe of smoke that hugs the ground like a beached cloud. Is something in the fields on fire? Is it intentional and controlled? We don’t know, it is too far to see with any certainty. Gradually, the plume of smoke rises to mingle with the overcast, overexposed sky.
iPhone 15 Pro, Halide Process Zero, 77mm ƒ2.8
I’d lived in London for a long time. It was home to me, I knew it well. Lurching and braying I had always expected to be dragged from it, but in the end I departed eagerly, excitedly. The crowds had become too much, the crime too prevalent, the prices too high. I know that, more than likely, I was the one that changed, not the city, and I’ll always defend London against people who write it off as a miserable place full of wankers, but my time with it was done.
During that trip to Yorkshire I felt doubt, for the first time since we had begun the endeavour of finding a new place to live. I was looking at these small towns, with cute cobbled streets and a plethora of independent shops swarmed by ogling tourists clutching maps of castles and was struck with the impression that there was no hiding in these places. In London, if you didn’t want to be around tourists, you didn’t have to. If you didn’t want to be around bankers and business men, then don’t be. If you wanted to go to a place where no one knew you and you could sink silently away into imperceptibility, you could.
Would I be ok without the diversity, the vibrancy? Would I go crazy with the silence? Would I let my edges soften too much and never be able to return to a city? Would I regret the years I had spent in London, and grow angry with myself for not making the right decision sooner? Was I leaning into impulses better defeated?
At the height of those worries, we took a walk around Brimham Rocks.
At one point on the walk we stood together on a precipice that jutted out from the edge of a cliff. In the distance, a fire burned on a field, releasing a great plume of smoke that dragged across the landscape. There were other people around, and assumedly people down on the field with the fire, but I wasn’t aware of any of them; we were as alone as we had been on the whole trip. I breathed in the air, listened to the rustle of the trees. It was a surreal, breathtaking view, and as cool wind whipped through our hair and a chill settled into my cheeks, the doubts began to wane.
For a week now we’ve called the low-scoring town home. It’s new, it’s uncertain, but it feels good. Maybe this won’t be for us, plenty of people make a move like this and find themselves pulled back to the cities they left, but it’s worth trying.
It’s easy to stick to what you know, to not take risks, to let opportunities dissolve away into the flow of things to worry about because it’s just easier to not bother, but I’m glad we seized this one while it was in reach. Moving will never fix all your problems, but it can at least make some of them easier to manage, and for me that’s enough right now.