Local Distinctiveness

England in Particular

Common Ground encourages you to stand up for your place. We are working intensively towards a big book, ENGLAND IN PARTICULAR - a kind of encyclopaedia of LOCAL DISTINCTIVENESS - to be published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2006, extensively championing the importance of variegation across England. Our localities need our constant attention, but our task - initially - is to excite people - as locals or visitors - with ways of getting under the surface of places, offering a way of looking at the local, a kind of evolving celebration.

We have a web-site dedicated to our work on Local Distinctiveness connected to this book:

www.england-in-particular.info

This will develop, but we have made a start, a few ways of navigating the great common wealth of nature, landscapes, buildings, settlements, histories, myths and stories, always on the move, which in their interweaving give us the rich and varied particularity of our surroundings. The web-site is about ways of looking. One of the best ways of savouring a place is by walking, alone and with others, so we have arranged it in the form of pathways which can be followed in a linear way, or diverted from when curiosity calls. Our hope is that by drawing attention to the detail and diversity of places, we might excite you into wanting to see your own place and places you journey to and through with fresh eyes.

The current pathways explore Buildings, Calendar customs, Cycling, the Green Man, Orchards, Parish Maps, Rivers, Trees, White Horses. Producing the Goods is our new work beginning in 2005.

These are just a few ways of navigating the great common wealth of nature, landscapes, settlements, buildings, histories, myths and stories, always on the move, which in their interweaving give us the rich and variegated particularity of our surroundings. We need to confront the paradox of LOCAL DISTINCTIVENESS - our surroundings are dynamic, questing nature, new people and ideas, cultural shifts, climatic change, new technologies and economic imperatives. Some of these enrich, some homogenise and deplete. We are looking for the positive, good examples of change ­ THE BEST OF THE NEW.