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About

I began this blog soon after arriving in North Wales in summer 2022, having given up my career as an Early Years teacher in London for the chance to live somewhere more peaceful and slow-paced. I spent my first year here in Bangor as a Stay-At-Home-Dad and an MA student. I'm now neither of those things, and I've found a nice, quiet job in Mental Health working for Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board. That's a joke, in case it needed spelling out. Let's just say my stress levels are still slightly lower than they were when I was teaching.

In my last few years in London, I started walking as a way of combating the stress of work, Covid, and general anxiety over the state of the world. I used walking as a means of discovering the history of my neighbourhood and the wider city. I followed underground rivers and searched for the remains of cattle markets, abandoned railway stations, and anything that hinted at what might have once stood here. When I moved to Wales, I used the same strategy to build a connection with my new home.

This blog is a space for me to share my thoughts on walking, photography, parenthood, and 

You can contact me on joebengeuk@gmail.com or via my site at joebenge.uk

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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...
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Reaching for water

When we moved to Bangor in 2022, the couple we bought our house from had told us that there was an underground river running at the bottom of our street. I'd spent the previous 18 months walking the routes of the hidden rivers that flow underneath the streets of London, so this was a sign to me that we'd chosen the right town to move to. That river flowing under Bangor is the Adda. Over the last two and a half years, I've walked the route of the Adda countless times, from its source near a retail carpark on the edge of town, through the centre of Bangor, to where it trickles out into the Menai Strait at Hirael Bay. Bangor is built in the valley of this river, so just walking into town from our home leads me along its path. Although the Adda runs entirely underground, if you look carefully you'll spot signs of its existence. When it rains, which is most of the time, you might see sandbags outside the now closed Poundland in the city centre, or hear water loudly flowing u...
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John Thomas of Liverpool and Lagos

Bangor and the surrounding parts of North Wales are noticeably less diverse than South Wales. There is less industry here and the region hasn't been as reshaped by overseas immigration as, say, Cardiff or Swansea. The major cultural change here has come from English migration, particularly in the last 50 years or so. I'm one of those migrants now, so my relationship to Bangor is understandably different to someone born here in North Wales. Coming from London, the lack of diversity here in Bangor is one of the big differences to life in a global megacity. But this is clearly changing. Bangor University and Ysbyty Gwynedd attract students and workers from all over the world, and many have brought their families with them or started families here. It's noticeable in some parts of the city, when walking past school gates at 3pm for example, just how diverse a population there is developing here. That said, Black history has been interlinked with the history of North Wales since...
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