A Sense of Place

When you live in London you are rarely called upon to think about the rest of the UK. There is little pressure to consider the connection between the land beneath your feet and the other cities or rural parts of this country. Unless your personal circumstances force you to confront it, it is very easy to float through life without care or concern for the non-metropolitan view of what it means to live in the United Kingdom.

Moving to North Wales, I was suddenly required to confront the boundaries and limitations of the place that I inhabit. The city I now live in, Bangor, is inextricably a place within a wider place. It would not exist if not for the resources within the mountains bordering it, or for the wealth Britain extracted from its colonies via slavery. My experience of living in Bangor is defined by both the city's close proximity to the mountains of Eryri and its distance from London, as well as almost every other major city in the UK.

Before I moved here, I had very strongly identified myself as a Londoner - connected to the specific parts of East and North London that I had grown up in, and that my Dad's family had lived in for well over a hundred years before my birth. I have lived elsewhere for periods, but have spent most of my life within a few miles of where I was born. My experience has been very different from that of many Londoners, shaped by my race, class, and other factors, but that experience could only have happened in this specific time and place.

In the months since we arrived in Bangor, I have met many people who have a very similar feeling of connection to a place - the small towns and mountains of North Wales. As an outsider to this country and its culture, I can relate to that sense of place, but I can never fully understand their connection to this specific place. It belongs to them, and not to me. 

But I want to understand it better than I do now, and that's been a major focus of my energy since arriving here. Pushing my toddler in her buggy, I have walked almost every street of this town over the last 5 months. I don't drive, so I have been limited to wherever I can get to on my own two feet. I've scrambled through bushes and across golf courses, down steep paths leading to the Menai Straits, along muddy trails and through fields of sheep. In my last few years in London, these were the exact same strategies I used to come to a better understanding of London's history. Exploring a place by walking, and walking the same streets or paths as often as possible, reveals things that wouldn't draw someone's attention when driving past.

Walking the long cycle path from Porth Penrhyn to Bethesda, Lôn Las Ogwen, I learned about the visible remains of the slate industry in North Wales, and its connections to the history of slavery and the British Empire in the Caribbean. While definitely a remote part of the UK, this corner of North Wales has never been isolated from the rest of the world. The slate quarries here were once the largest in the world, and Bangor's tiny port sent ships loaded with this slate to the United States and around the world. In Bethesda, the huge piles of discarded slate still loom over the town, and above these lie the enormous quarry itself, carved out of the mountainside. The men who owned this quarry, and who extracted so much wealth from the mountains of North Wales, had also owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. Those plantations were reliant on slave labour, and their owner, the 1st Baron Penrhyn, Richard Pennant, had been a staunch pro-slavery MP in the second half of the 18th century. When he died in 1808, his descendants used the money they received in compensation when slavery was abolished to develop the slate quarry into a powerhouse of the industrial revolution. As that money was ploughed into building the infrastructure around Penrhyn quarry, the town of Bangor grew up around it and, to some extent, in service of it.

Signs of these connections between slavery, sugar, and the industrial revolution are built into the material landscape in Bangor. The influence of the Pennant family in shaping the development of the city is carved into bricks across the city. Streets are still named after the original Baron Penrhyn. The original site of the town's university was provided by the same family. The Penrhyn castle and estate stands at the edge of the town, now run by the National Trust. If you keep your eyes open here, you will find traces of these connections everywhere. To me, an outsider looking to understand the place I now live in, this history of who and what was here before me is a key to develop that sense of place that I've been looking for.