Years ago I had to go the Canary Wharf, London for a three hour meeting. I had always had many preconceptions of London many to its detriment. I viewed it as expensive, crime ridden, grimy place with showy overpriced theatres and restaurants and large posh shops, poverty and social problems by the score and people looking to rip you off at every corner. Of course, I was wrong and its this particular trip that changed my mind. After the meeting I decided to walk back along the South Bank and wandered into Southwark. There I came across a building site where the building had been stopped. The cause of the stoppage, I was told by a local, was the discovery of a mass grave, possibly from a plague, and the excavators feared that there might be bacteria left in the soil or some form of contagion, so even after the appropriate authorities and checks had been done they refused to dig further even after the bodies had been removed. What drew my attention to this site is that on the chain link fence people had tied ribbons, cloth and paper labels with messages to the dead. The messages struck me as something beautiful, not just acts of respect for ancestors for sympathy, empathy and even love for them. That people in London could feel and show this changed my preconceptions.
On the same amble through Southwark I came across a block of flats with one of the most beautiful shared gardens and beautiful widow boxes from almost every balcony. An old man saw me admiring this site and strolled to the garden gate, introduced himself and invited me into the garden to take a closer look. We talked about ourselves and where I came from, which he found incredible as he thought my home town was a village amongst flat fields. In a little over an hour he talked about his life and how he came from Ghana aged 7 and how gardening was in his blood and was what he was happiest doing. He would have loved to have farmed as he remembered enjoying a more rural childhood. I admitted to him that I found London a frightening place in which people didn’t tend to talk to each other. He laughed at me and explained that this may be so as people travel around the city and are “busy, busy” but I must think of London as a collection of villages and as you walk into a village most people are good and most people are friendly.
People can have many preconceptions of the Fens, its landscape, its people and its culture and this has been the case for centuries: A place where “Where pig dung soap and cow dung fire.”[i] ; A place full of inbreds and people with webbed feet and extra fingers[ii]; A place where you either drive a tractor for the rest of your life or head to work in a factory.[iii] There are many illusions that all fen farmers are rich (believe me they are not) and can grow anything on their land (fenland varies greatly from grade 1 double-cropping to low grade three which is commercially best for pasture in my opinion).
Other’s romanticise the Fens as an idyllic flat land that’s a friend to cyclists, even though a head wind with no obstacles can be far worse than any incline. People from London view it as being “up north” and people from Northumberland view it as “down south”. The biographer of St. Guthlac described the Fens such: “ There is in the middle part of Britain a hideous fen of huge bigness, which beginning at the banks of the river Grante, extends itself from the south to the north in a very long tract, even to the sea.”[iv] These are some of the more pleasant misconceptions. If you descend into the pits of social media you can find many modern ones too, not just sourced from people away from the area, but also by those living locally.
[i] Daniel Defoe
[ii] Various comics in the 80’s and 90’s
[iii] This is unverified and allegedly came from Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s lyricist who came from Horncastle.
[iv] Felix’s Life of St. Guthlac 8th Century.
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