Somewheres or Anywheres?
What are the benefits to living your whole life in the same place?
Last week, we considered in brief what Wendell Berry has to say about community, and specifically your own local community. Today, we’re sharing with you an article by another writer on a similar topic, namely the benefits of staying in the same town you and your family all call home.
In the article Somewhere in Chessington, Rhys Laverty describes his hometown of Chessington as “a working-class redoubt of just under twenty thousand souls, largely the families of what an outsider might call “white-van men” – builders, plumbers, and electricians.” It is located about a half an hour south-west of London, but a few highways have hemmed it in and kept it from dissolving into just another suburb. While not all that remarkable at first glance, Laverty tells us that it is remarkable because it is an intergenerational family town. His family, including aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, all grew up and live there still, and on a day to day basis when he walks through town he runs into a relative or a relative-of-a-relative. This is unusual for the modern world, though not unusual if you look at broader history, and it is a great blessing. As he points out at the beginning of the article, when family emergencies pop up and childcare needs to be reworked, for example, you have a large local network that can step in immediately to fill the gap. Large families and local families provide a soft cushion to land on like no other, whether that be having grandparents watch your children once a week, or having a caring ear to listen to you when you need it.
When you read about the benefits of living as he does in a tight-knit community, you’re bound to wonder why anyone would move away. Taking a phrase from a book by David Goodhart to explain this, Laverty describes two groups of people: Somewheres and Anywheres. “The Anywheres derive their identities from intangibles such as their education and careers; the Somewheres derive theirs from a sense of place and local community.” Anywheres have become the norm these days, and Laverty identifies two unsurprising things that are threatening the towns of Somewheres: housing prices and higher education. Of housing, he writes “Two of my cousins, both with children of their own, have had to move in with their parents to save for a house. Others I know have had to uproot themselves to somewhere cheaper to start their own families, turning intergenerational relationships once maintained on a daily basis into the stuff of WhatsApp groups and bank-holiday visits. When their parents eventually die, having likely sold their house to pay for their final years in a nursing home, inflated house prices (exacerbated by the expensive elaboration of loft conversions and extensions) mean there’s no way their children will be able to afford what were once their parents’ homes.”
The second culprit, higher education, is perhaps even more at fault. This entire paragraph explains it perfectly: “The prospectus of our local girls’ comprehensive school boasts of its sixth form that “the vast majority of students receive the maximum five ‘offers’ from their chosen universities and most are accepted on to their ‘first choice’ of university course.” One thing this means is that many of these girls won’t return home. They’ll stay in their uni town, move abroad, or move a few travel zones north into London proper. Those who do return will have immensely weakened their bonds with the place; they’re likely to view homecoming as a kind of defeat. And you can understand why. Before they go to university, the stories of a thousand-and-one films and songs drip-feed into teenagers’ minds something I call “Born To Run Syndrome”: “Oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back / It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap / We gotta get out while we’re young / ’Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.” Chessington is hardly the kind of derelict East-Jesus-Nowhere that inspired Springsteen in the seventies, but the well-trodden “let’s blow this popcorn stand!” myth is so ingrained by now that it may as well be. The political and ideological chemistry of university, too, is pure acid to familial bonds, invested as it is in questioning anything inherited, culture not least. Most young people don’t stand a chance of developing a healthy relationship to hearth and hometown. Anywhereism makes great inroads this way.”
The small town I grew up in, and which I now live nearby, is similar to Chessington in this regard. There are many families here to whom it is their Somewhere, and who still have large extended families living there or nearby. What Laverty says of the good of his hometown Chessington and the creeping dangers to it could just as easily have been written about any number of small towns here in the U.S.. Of course, there are great benefits to college education and good reasons to move away from your hometown. However, Laverty encourages all of us, who are steeped in the modern view of progress and who easily turn away from the “nowheres” we come from, to take a second look at the option of staying local and the irreplaceable blessing of being close to family. In casting off our status as Somewheres to become Anywheres, are we casting off more good things than we are gaining? At the end of his article Laverty contrasts the college graduates from his hometown today with his mother, who never went to college and never left her hometown. I won’t spoil it here, but that paragraph alone is sure to make you reconsider the value of staying local.
The whole article, Somewhere in Chessington, can be read here.