» When Did You Last Look Up…

When did you last take a walk around where you live, or work, or where your family live? When did you last really look at nearest town or city?

A strange question maybe, but it’s a fact that people often take their own neighborhood for granted, and only get to know it if they’re showing a stranger around, or taking someone to see the ’sights’. And that’s a shame because so often there are interesting things to see. Things that we miss as we go about our everyday lives.

For a couple of years I worked in the English town of Leek, in the Staffordshire Moorlands. A small town, past its heyday, that seemed to have little to recommend it despite its proud claim to be the ‘Queen of the Moorlands’. In fact on a winter’s day, when the wind swept down from those same moorlands and the rain lashed the rows of terraced houses making them look especially unattractive, there was little to recommend it.

But Leek is full of hidden treasures, which I found just by walking around with my eyes looking ahead or upwards, rather than at my feet. There’s a small college which started life as a municipal & technical school and a silk school, both opened in 1900 as an addition to the earlier Nicholson Library and Institute. These buildings had links with William Morris, who lived in the town for a while, and others from the Arts and Crafts movement. Oscar Wilde gave a lecture on ‘dress’ at the Institute in 1885.

Despite recent modern additions many original features remain, including a number of friezes on the outside of the building depicting different areas of the arts, which look like they’ve been lifted from Wedgwood vases.Other buildings in the town have similar friezes.

Detail from a frieze on the Leek and Moorlands Cooperative Society building

There are almshouses and similar buildings with fascinating plaques, telling you who built them, when and why. And the Ragged School, which always made me wonder how the poor children felt to be given such a label. In true Victorian fashion the benefactors were proud of their philanthropy and wanted to broadcast it to the world (or at least that small proportion of the world that visited Leek!).

Many rows of terraces had names and construction dates built into them, each one having a story to tell I’d guess.

And my final memory is of a beautiful 17^th century cottage just off the marketplace, almost overgrown with ivy and other climbers, with the most beautiful ironwork gate. It housed a tea room on market days, now sadly closed as the owner pursues his love of old clocks instead.

Detail from the gate of a 17th century house in Leek

Once I’d started to uncover these treasures I made a regular habit of taking a walk at lunchtime, and going down different streets each time. There was always something new to see if I looked carefully. Something, however small, to add to my knowledge and enjoyment of the town.

Most urban areas have their stories to tell. Street names are often clues to past activities, and when a development has grown out from an older center it too will have its share of memories from the past. Names of long defunct banks and insurance companies still adorning their original premises, scraps from old advertisements painted on the sides of buildings, even unexpected areas of green – a peace garden in the middle of a busy town center for example.

You can seek out the buildings that have defied modernization or large scale development, nestling in amongst newer, brasher neighbors; glimpses of architectural styles from past centuries, and early industrial buildings that haven’t yet been converted into trendy living spaces.

You just don’t know what you might find, or the stories it might tell. So stop watching where you’re putting your feet, lift up your head, and start discovering the world around you.