York
York is as different from my home town London as can be. One is a global city of 11 million people and the other is a tiny city of some 200,000 which is a lower population that the district of London I come from. It’s also right up in the middle of the north of England, a historic town that served as the de facto capital of England from 1298 to 1304. So the place has history, plenty of fresh air, farms and is a complete change culturally from London. That’s the main reason aside of my degree subject that I went, to live in a place that felt wholly different from home. To go to the north and to experience that side of England.
Montage of sites in the city of York, Wikipedia
For those three years it was interesting to see and live in a place where things seemed so different, and to travel across the north of England for the first time. Going to Newcastle, Durham, Sunderland, Bradford and others to visit and play university sports. Then there were the seaside towns of Scarborough and Whitby, the UK’s furthest inland port city, Goole. Because York was so small we’d get the train to Leeds, and onwards to Manchester and Liverpool for more interesting day trips and nights out.
I got to really see the culture around the north of England and to see the effects of post industrial Britain not just on London, but on the rest of the country. That includes the industrial heartland in Wolverhampton, Walsall, Sheffield and Coventry too. This experience was what inspired me to write my dissertation and my final essay at University. The former being called ‘The Decline of the West’, based on a 1923 book by Oswald Spengler, and the latter on Post Industrial Britain. I was far from knowledgable and have continued to build the understanding of how the world ebbs and flows because this served as a great foundation.
Heslington Hall, University of York
Location
York.
Writing
As I mentioned above the years in York were a good way to understand both Britain and the nature of human societies. How we have grown and evolved as a species, and how change inevitably comes regardless of past success. Over there years I’ve continued to go to places to see and understand human society as a whole and in the constituent autonomous parts that somehow evolve together despite large distances. From my fiction writing there are two stories from York of totally opposite tone. Forever Young and Playing In The Rain.
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