"Discover the wonders of exploring closer to home."
If anyone else had written a book about exploring the area around where they live it may not have landed quite as well as this one by Alastair Humphreys, who has cycled around the world, rowed the Atlantic and undertaken all manner of further adventures, macro and micro in his search for... what exactly? In Local, he gets to the bottom of it, because here on his home patch he unlocks countless stories of nature, history, the marvels of the universe, you name it and more besides, and you wonder in the end why he bothered going anywhere! But of course it is exactly because he is one of our greatest living explorers that he is able to turn his local turf into an adventure playground.
Local made me chuckle and think in equal measure. To begin with Humphreys doesn't like where he lives, and as you follow him past derelict buildings, fly-tipping spots, along polluted canals and so on, you can't help thinking that he must have made an enemy of his local estate agents, and possibly anyone else invested in property anywhere between London and the English Channel. However, his boundless curiosity is unleashed upon this strip of land and takes him to places that he would never have imagined had existed, and from there the real magic happens as he connects what he finds with a much bigger picture.
Humphreys approaches his forensic exploration by following a structured process. Firstly he buys himself an Ordnance Survey map with his home at its centre. These maps have 400 squares on them, each 1km high and wide, and he commits to visiting one each week for a year to see what it has to offer. Once there, he bimbles about on foot and bicycle, squinting at flowers, climbing into holes, examining litter, noticing birdlife, talking to people... normal, yet untypical behaviour... but then his energetic mind won't stop whirring all the way home to his shed where he fires up his computer and researches online what he has seen up close. What he finds out is amazing.
In the end what Local shows us is that this wonderful, beautiful, fascinating planet is here, all around us, hiding in plain view. Wherever you live is important and connected if you just care to look, think and dig deeper. There are no barriers, particularly, to exploring locally. The only thing stopping us is us. Alastair Humphreys provides a template to learn more about where we live, who we are, and our place in nature. It's a reset for the modern age, a challenge to our Brit DNA that exploration is all about taking risks in foreign lands. Humphreys has removed risk and cost from the equation, and so perhaps for the first time he is not on an adventure, but on something much more important than that.
Join Alastair Humphreys on the London Mountain Podcast, discussing his book Local and the joy of find adventure close to home.
| Primary Genre | Nature and the natural world: general interest |
| Other Genres: | |
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