Stopovers in my small town

Hinckley and Bosworth. Small urban district in southwest Leicestershire. A place you probably have not heard of. It is however, well known amongst motorbike enthusiasts for its attachment to the brand Triumph. It may be well known by users of the A5 for its midway convenience up the stretch of England’s interior. What I can say with certainty though, is that it is a place that I happen to know very well. For this town in particular is none other than the cage of my childhood (at least perhaps once I thought it was). 

Ah yes, the shackles of the small town. If you have ever lived in one, you might know what I mean—mini metropolises, where general opinions feel closed-minded and dreams feel stunted. Like many small towns across the country, we had one high school where everyone who lived within a 10-mile radius attended, a distinct lack of food takeaway options, and one nightclub, which changed its name every year after inevitably being caught for allowing underage drinking. From the ages of 3 to 18, Hinckley raised me, although mostly against my will. Even after leaving home for what I thought would be for good, I somehow ended up living back there three times. As I grew up, the more desperate it all seemed. The painfully stubborn Conservative backing, the waning countryside in the face of growing development and the distinct lack of anything to do. There was a time when I genuinely wondered why on earth anyone would choose to live here. When it was finally our chance to fly the nest, some of my peers left with me, but many others decided to stay. It is a district with one of the lowest rates of social mobility in the country and over half of the buildings in town lay abandoned from before I was born. The town where nothing moves. This is Hinckley 

So I yearned, for years, to get out. All I wanted growing up was to leave. I didn’t care where I went, as long as it were far enough away that I could forget about Hinckley, forget about that chain hanging off of my ankle. I thought if I left, I might finally be free to express myself, follow my passions, achieve my dreams. I attached my own ideas of restraint and boredom to its LE postcodes, and I longed for the day I could say ‘I have left and I am never going back’.

I have had my fair share of adventures, but at 24 years old, I was back in my parents' house, wondering what I was doing with my life. After a year of living and working in London, a mental and physical health break brought me back to the four walls of my childhood. The unrelenting nature of London was all I had ever wanted growing up. The ever-changing, constantly moving, hustle and bustle of excitement and activity. Everything that Hinckley was not. But the reality was exhausting. I was forced to confront the problems in my life; my newfound lack of time and space meant that there was nowhere I could run to avoid them anymore, and life, as it sometimes does, was unsparing with the further challenges it began to present. I was smothered in a pile of stress, anxiety, worry, depression and fear. I felt totally and utterly alone, in a city where it is your responsibility to avoid the plight of loneliness, not the other way round. I wasn’t expressing myself freely, I wasn’t following my passions, and I was nowhere near achieving my dreams. I woke up each morning, walked to the carriage of a crowded train, sat in an office selling products to people who all earned five times my salary, and then came home. I could not afford to live in this city, and it was making me miserable. For so long, it was all I’d ever wanted, and yet I spent so many months living in unhappiness. I left swearing I might never return (spoiler alert: a year later, and I know that one day soon I will be, and I can’t wait). Still, back in an autumn gone by, there were only so many times I could lay my blanket out in Wandsworth Park, look up at the sky above me and wonder: is this the ‘more’ I was looking for?

I reached a breaking point, quit my job while on sick leave, packed my belongings, and did what anyone who could would. I ran home. To the very town I was so desperate to leave. To the same life I had never wanted. Because I didn’t know where else to turn. Because there was nowhere left to run, but home. I didn’t know it then; I was far too deep in the pool of pain to wade through the mess. But coming back when I did was the greatest choice I’d ever made for myself. Only in returning home would I have ever been able to gather the strength I needed to feel brave enough to leave again.

The week after I arrived back, I decided to try out a free yoga class in the village. I parked my car at the village hall and walked up the three flights of stairs in the old factory building until I reached a loft space, adorned with white linen curtains hanging off expansive ceiling windows. Patterned poofs with that fair trade shop feel to them occupied the small changing area, the ones exported from Northern Thailand or Bali all the way to a small town in southwest Leicestershire of all places. An eclectic group of locals collected their mats, blocks and bolsters before heading into the airy studio, and I followed with nervous trepidation. The class ran for an hour and 30 minutes, and quite frankly, I was dying within the first 10 minutes. I’d chosen the studio for its dedication to delivering traditional yoga, but I was distracted, low and hurting. I resented trying to engage in the chants, found frustration in my lack of energy, and walked out with no intention of going back. That, and something about being sat in a conservative, majority white English town attempting to chant in Sanskrit, the language of yoga - a practice developed in a country we relentlessly colonised, just felt hollow and performative. Who did Hinckley think it was to be flaunting colourful poofs and Sanskrit chanting when I knew what was lurking underneath - a substantial degree of anti-immigration rhetoric and growing community support for Reform UK. It was disillusioning.

So I left the class and stepped out in the crisp, fragile air. Just outside of the old factory, however, there’s a record shop, and I drifted inside without much thought. It’s got as many genres as you can think of in there, and the guy who runs it is deeply passionate about music. He can recognise every vinyl he has in stock and will give you a backstory or personal opinion on many of them. There are four cases of vinyls going for a pound each just outside the front, and I stood for a while, despite the chill of the misty November morning, flicking through them. The shop is only open on the weekend, but for where I lived, it was a marvel it existed at all. Rock, blues, jazz, soul. Melodic doorways to distant worlds. My shoulders sank back down into their resting places for the first time in a long time, and I was forgetting about the yoga class. Thinking instead of Christmas gifts, family, and home. I picked up a live Bruce Springsteen album for my dad and headed back to my car. The record shop was warm, inviting, and intriguing. It was different.

I signed up for a gym membership in the hotel around the corner from my house. A 5-minute walk away it couldn’t be more convenient, and the hotel is relatively picturesque due to its Tudor-style design and neighbouring horse paddock. My family had been members there when my sister and I were children, and we frequently used the pool, playing and laughing with goggles and armbands. On my first visit since returning, I stopped by the sauna, only to be greeted by the man who has delivered our Indian takeaway for the last fifteen years. We had once run into this man in Dubai Airport at 4 am, and yet somehow, the sauna still felt like a weirder location for our reunion. We chatted for a bit about his restaurant and my upcoming travel plans. He gave me some recommendations for beach resorts in Bangladesh (I had no foreseeable plans to travel to Bangladesh, nor had I mentioned it to him, but I appreciated the gesture). He told me that he came to this gym every day. That made me chuckle a bit. Not because he had a healthy gym schedule. But it was a reminder of just how far from London I was. That I could come to this gym at any point of the week and most likely see someone I know EVERY time. And by someone I know, it's a 60-year-old man who runs a thriving local business that we frequented almost weekly growing up. It reminded me what community felt like for a moment. The weird and wonderful encounters you can’t avoid when your habitat is walkable and contained. For better and for worse, that community is always there. Waiting for you in the local sauna.

Thirty minutes by car from Hinckley, there’s a farm which has been converted into a bookshop. My dad took me one weekday in December, in an attempt to get me out of the house. I’d never even heard of it before, but I went along with a small sense of curiosity. An emporium of new and old, it is a marvel to explore. As you meander away from the entrance, the heating gives out, and the outdoor chill radiates from the unevenly laid brick walls. With each new shelf of knowledge, you step further into the cold, but the winding passages of literature continue to invite you into icier exploration. Row upon row of history, fiction, travel, autobiography, you name it, expand through nooks and crannies until you reach a reading area with a log fire and seating. They have books which were hundreds of years old, a locked cabinet of literature on witchcraft and sorcery, and even first editions of The Lord of the Rings. My dad and I spent hours in there. He bought a few books, but I just took it all in. It was the kind of place I loved, less than an hour from home. Hinckley, perhaps, was starting to feel a little more special.

As you enter the building, there is a blue plaque by the door, an item of decor commonly associated with an acknowledgement of some event or person of historical notoriety taking residence in the buildings they are attached to. This one said:

“On this site Sept 5, 1782 nothing happened”

I had to laugh. How very Hinckley. Yet I think about it now, and I wonder how true that statement is. One of the most basic definitions of place attests that a place is but a location with meaning (Cresswell, 2008). A set of coordinates may tell you where something is, but a place is where something happens: whether that is physically or emotionally, for one person or many. A place is a collection of moments gathered within a cartographic context. As much a memory as an entity. Perhaps nothing happened here on September 5, 1782. But on the 13th of November 2024, I found something new and interesting, in a place which I had previously relegated to the realm of unimportance. And that seemed a little meaningful to me.

The same can be said for the record shop. The yoga studio was a different kind of place, for another type of person. One with whom I will admit I am not that far removed, but one who may see spirituality and yoga a little differently than I do. And that is ok. Places cannot be everything for everyone. And perhaps I might have let my resentment towards Hinckley infect my experience of it anyway. It can sometimes be hard to tell how you really feel about something when your mind is already so lost in itself. I have no evidence that the people in that class were individually contributing to the things that make Hinckley so unlikeable to me. A place is a sum of many parts, some may just happen to be louder than others after all. The gym was a place with meaning too. On my third visit as a 24-year-old, I was sitting reading my book, and I saw two sisters, both under the age of 10, playing in the pool. A gentle reminder that the cycle continues and the place renews itself for each person who finds themselves there. 

It didn’t happen all at once. There was no eureka moment or great realisation. But slowly, little by little, these small moments grew into a deeper, more profound sense of understanding. The acceptance that this town was not and had never been my burden, but merely a stop along my journey. To believe that I could be shackled to it was to think that it somehow defined me. But it did not. I defined it. I decided what kind of place it was, and how I chose to feel about it became the reality of my experience. There is still much about Hinckley that I dislike. I say this honestly. I haven’t changed my mind on the politics, or the developments, or the fact that it can feel like there are more Greggs than GPs at times. But there was much about London that I did not like, and I must say that even despite everything that happened there, I was far less likely to critique the latter than the former. Because there is that natural part of me which equates somewhere like London with the idea of success, and somewhere like Hinckley with the feeling of failure. For London is oh so very big, and Hinckley is oh so very small, is it not?

Going home again, I saw a different side to the town that I thought I knew. I saw a town where passionate people have found their creative outlets. I saw a town where people treat themselves to daily trips to the sauna, and authentic vinyasas. A town where children are learning to grow, just like I did. Figuring out the world for the first time, just like I am. A town where something happens every day, even if it only decides to whisper rather than roar. This town, in my hour of need, was there for me in a way London never was. It coddled me, held me in its warm embrace, until I was brave enough to face the world again. It tucked me into bed, and woke me up with the late morning sun. Its paths guided me until I was ready to chart new territory, and its record shops and bookstores reignited a spark in me that I had lost. A spark which reminded me that places are what we make them. They become as we become, and how we choose to embody them defines the body they inevitably inhabit. Maybe that’s what they all meant when they said home is where the heart is? I don’t know. But what I do know is that a place need not be perfect to be what you need. As human beings, we build our environments reflectively. When we put our dreams out into the world, the world becomes what we dreamt it could be. Hinckley is home to people who have dreamed, just like I have, and to people who have made their dreams a reality, just like I will. Maybe then, there was always more to it than I previously thought.

Remember: growing up in a small town, does not resign you to a small life. But living a small life does not mean you are living an unsuccessful one. <3