Stopovers in my small town

Hinckley and Bosworth. Small urban district in southwest Leicestershire. Well-known amongst motorbike enthusiasts for its association with the brand Triumph. Well known by users of the A5 for its midway convenience up the stretch of England’s interior. Well known to me as the cage I thought I was trapped in for 20 years of my childhood. 

Ah, yes, the shackles of the small town. From the ages of 3 to 18, this was my home, and since leaving for university, I have somehow ended up living back there three times in six years. Like many small towns across the country, we had one leading 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. The older I got, the more desperate it all seemed. The painfully stubborn Conservative backing, the waning countryside in the face of growing housing and warehouse development and the distinct lack of anything to do. It’s the kind of place you can’t imagine anyone really dreams of moving to, but people somehow just end up in and never leave. It is a district with one of the lowest rates of social mobility in the country, and over half of the buildings in town lie abandoned. The town where nothing moves. This is Hinckley.

There have been many times in my life when I feared I might get stuck in the stagnation of that place. That no matter how hard I tried, the town that raised me would be forever chained to my ankle, preventing me from venturing too far for too long. Curtailing any sight of a broad horizon that might lie ahead. Whilst I have had my fair share of adventures, here I am at 24 years old, back in my parents’ house, wondering what on Earth I am 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 reconcile the problems in my life; my newfound lack of time and space meant that there was nowhere I could run to avoid them anymore. They smothered me 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.

So I 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 it was comfortable. Because it was easy. Because I didn’t know where else to turn. And in the most bizarre way possible, I am glad I did. I know! Something I honestly never thought I would say. And it is not because I have changed my mind about what I want from life. It’s not because I’ve suddenly decided that I love living in a town with more Greggs than GPs. But I think that only by coming back would I find part of the key to breaking the chain that has brought me so much unhappiness.

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 to a small town in southwest Leicestershire, of all places. Believe me when I say, this vibe was distinctly un-Hinckley, at least when I was growing up. 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. It was one of those classes, too, which tries a bit too hard to be ‘authentic’. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for people wanting to follow yoga properly, but something about being sat in a conservative English town attempting to chant in Sanskrit just felt a little disconnected for me. I murmured along in slightly uncomfortable compliance, got to the end of the class, and walked out deflated.

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 insanely passionate about music. He can recognise every vinyl he has in stock and will give you a backstory or personal opinion on each one you choose to buy. There are four cases of vinyls going for a pound each just outside the front, and I stood for a while, in the chill of a misty November morning, flicking through them. The shop is only open on the weekend, but for where I lived, it was a marvel that it existed at all. Rock, blues, jazz, soul. Melodic doorways to distant worlds. My shoulders sank back down into their resting place, 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. It was warm in the record shop, inviting and intriguing. It was different.

I signed up for a gym membership at 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 being back, I hit up 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.

Thirty minutes by car from Hinckley, there is a farm that has been converted into a bookshop. An emporium of new and old, it is a marvel to explore. As you meander away from the entrance, the heating gives out. 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 had 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. As you enter the building, there is a blue plaque by the door, an item of decoration commonly associated with an acknowledgement of some event or person of historical notoriety who took residence in the building to which it is attached. 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 really 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 a different kind of person. One with whom I will admit I am not that far removed, but one who perhaps sees spirituality and yoga a little differently than I do. And that is ok. Places cannot be everything for everyone. The gym is one of these places 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. 

With that comes that piece of the puzzle you think you’ve lost, only to find it under the table 6 months later. The realisation that this town is not and has never been my burden, but merely a stop along my journey. To believe that I could be shackled to it is to think that it somehow defines me. But it does not. I define it. I decide what kind of place it is, and how I choose to feel about it becomes the reality of my experience. There is much about Hinckley that I dislike. But there is much about London that I do not like, and I must say I am 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. But it is my choice to feel that way, and that doesn’t make it accurate.

Being home again, I have seen a different side to the town that I thought I knew. I have seen a town where passionate people have found their creative outlets. I have seen a town where people treat themselves to daily trips to the sauna, and strangely 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. And a town which may not see me to the end of my days, but played a large part in the start of them. And for that, how can I be anything but grateful?

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