Struggling to put my home town on the map
Nicola faced a quandary explaining to an American where her home city is and what it is known for
EVER had to explain our home town to a stranger to these parts? As a lifelong Derbeian, I’m often surprised by how little people who don’t live here seem to know about our city. In fact, within the UK, many people aren’t even aware that we are a city.
I can’t be the only one who often finds themselves struggling to find a meaningful way of explaining my home town without resorting to mentioning Derby County. And, right now, outing yourself as a Rams fan is likely to elicit nothing more than sympathy. Besides, if you’re talking to someone who isn’t into football it’s probably not going to help anyway.
You can, of course, use the technicalities of geographical reference: Derby is a city of almost 260,000 inhabitants, the vast majority of whom were born and bred here. It stands in central England, approximately 70 miles from the nearest coast.
But all those facts tell a stranger the things that Derby is not … it’s not very large, not very small, not very near a beach.
There are plenty of things we’d probably prefer not to mention … like the Inner Ring Road that took 40 years to complete, and the destruction of some of our most historic streets in the process.
In fairness, most people within the UK have an approximate idea of where we are, even if they don’t know much about us, so it’s generally when talking with nonBrits that you find yourself in the situation of having to really explain us.
You can, of course, always resort to your knowledge of history. If you are in Boston, Massachusetts, for example, you can tell Bostonians that Derby is the birthplace of one of the founders of their city – John Cotton – and that their Boston Latin School was established as a copy of Derby School, which Cotton attended.
You can talk about universally known prestige brands like RollsRoyce and Royal Crown Derby. And if you embrace the entire county, well, you have the Peak District and Bakewell Puddings and Blue John to mention.
But, once you move away from popular foreign tourist spots, where they are not so used to encountering Brits, you begin to have a little more difficulty.
Therefore, speaking to a fellow customer in a diner in a small town in upstate New York, I found myself in a quandary. She’d asked us where we were from, hadn’t heard of Derby, and even several attempts at describing Derby’s famous manufacturers hadn’t helped one jot. The Peak District meant nothing to her. Then I tried mentioning us in terms of being midway between Sheffield and Birmingham. No luck. Nor with East Midlands Airport.
So, I turned to the tactic of absolute last resort for any loyal Derbeian. I told her that Derby was “quite near Nottingham”. I waited for her to exclaim: “Ah-hah!”. But she didn’t. When mentioning our greatest rivals didn’t trigger a single spark of recognition, I admit I did do a tiny internal fist pump.
In the end, in utter desperation, I asked her whether she had heard of Robin Hood. She had! Someone who had been entirely disinterested by our industrial heritage, or proximity to natural wonders, was utterly transfixed by a connection to a somewhat fictitious hero of English folklore.
When I told her that we lived “really not that far from Sherwood Forest”, she was quite impressed. It was probably more to do with Hollywood portrayals of the outlaw but, she seemed happy.
The next day, when a man asked the same question, I decided to keep it simple and told him that we were 126 miles north of London.
“Ah, out in the suburbs.” he nodded, before returning to his tuna melt.
I’m happy to say I’m better prepared these days, always ready with an armoury of Derby facts, from our having the first factory, the first public park, being a railway town, a Roman fort, a Viking settlement, a cathedral city, and the home of the second Co-operative society in the world, as well as, for the time being at least, home to a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Surely that’s enough to impress even the most unworldly stranger?