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Local

Alastair Humphreys

Société & Culture

Arts

Fréquence : 1 épisode/7j. Total Éps: 57

Do you yearn to connect with wildness and natural beauty more often? Could your neighbourhood become a source of wonder and discovery and change the way you see the world? Have you ever felt the call of adventure, only to realise that sometimes the most remarkable journeys unfold close to home? After years of challenging expeditions all over the world, adventurer Alastair Humphreys spends a year exploring the small map around his own home. Can this unassuming landscape, marked by the glow of city lights and the hum of busy roads, hold any surprises for the world traveller or satisfy his wanderlust? Could a single map provide a lifetime of exploration? Buy the book! www.alastairhumphreys.com/local

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🇬🇧 Grande Bretagne - placesAndTravel
17/07/2026
#70
🇬🇧 Grande Bretagne - placesAndTravel
22/06/2026
#59
🇬🇧 Grande Bretagne - placesAndTravel
14/06/2026
#79
🇬🇧 Grande Bretagne - placesAndTravel
24/04/2026
#93
🇬🇧 Grande Bretagne - placesAndTravel
04/03/2026
#94
🇩🇪 Allemagne - placesAndTravel
21/02/2026
#93
🇬🇧 Grande Bretagne - placesAndTravel
10/02/2026
#69
🇫🇷 France - placesAndTravel
04/02/2026
#81
🇨🇦 Canada - placesAndTravel
26/12/2025
#95
🇨🇦 Canada - placesAndTravel
25/12/2025
#69

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Access

Épisode 46

dimanche 1 septembre 2024 • Durée 13:45

A good old chunter about access rights, the right to roam, and Scandinavia's approach to allemansrätten.

My hopes were high. It was a perfect sunny day and the grid square looked enticing on paper. It was mostly woodland, with some contour lines, a small lake and the site of a Roman villa thrown in for luck. There was only one building on the whole square. A motorway and railway sliced through the middle, but a third of the area was a country park and all the rest was open countryside. I was looking forward to roving around a pleasant landscape dotted with enormous trees.

And yet...

And yet, it turned out that the solitary building was a historic manor house that owned most of the grid square and resolutely refused to share it with plebs like me. I was shunted away from the meadows and ancient trees by signs and fences, and ushered instead down an unattractive path squashed between the motorway and a metal fence. I hoped I could at least explore a small copse, but that turned out to belong to a golf course and was also off-limits. And the lake was ringed with forbidding notices from the fishing club that owned it.

So far, the most enjoyable part of the outing had been standing on the motorway bridge and watching the hypnotic traffic hurtle beneath me.

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Swimming

Épisode 45

mercredi 21 août 2024 • Durée 11:05

I cycled to today’s grid square with Test Match Special playing in my headphones. Listening to the ebb and flow of a cricket match arcing towards its conclusion is one of my greatest pleasures. I turned it off reluctantly when I arrived so that I could concentrate on what I was exploring.

I began outside a working man’s club with a fluttering Union Jack, then rode among Victorian terraces, streets of post-war pebbledash, and 1980s semis. A brick clock tower had been built in the town cen- tre with the largesse of the local mill owner 150 years ago, and the mill’s chimneys still smoked away in the distance. There was the usual array of shops and eateries: convenience stores, kebabs, fried chicken, Chinese, Indian, garage doors (that was a first), and a bookmaker. It was a typical old-fashioned town of struggling shops and pubs sliding into decline, plus a shiny new Domino’s Pizza takeaway.

An elderly man laboured across the street with his shopping trolley. A car slowed and waited an age for him to cross. ‘That will be me one day,’ I thought to myself, ‘sliding into decline.’ And, ‘Be grateful then for this moment,’ I reminded myself. This moment is my life

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Hovering

Épisode 36

mercredi 3 juillet 2024 • Durée 11:24

This kingdom of mine might cover only twenty kilometres squared, but it seemed at times to span a thousand worlds. From winter to sum- mer, welcoming smiles to grumpy shouts, and from last week’s jaded streets to this long grass, busy with butterflies, where I lay on my back, alone and undisturbed, and enjoyed the warm sun on my face.

Down in the distance I could see the city’s gleaming towers, shim- mering in the midsummer haze. I lay still for a while, listening, hov- ering above myself in my mind’s eye, allowing myself to settle into the grid square and its vibe. I heard birdsong and the hum of a motorway. ‘The language of birds is very ancient,’ wrote Gilbert White in a letter. ‘Little is said, but much is meant and understood.’

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Jaded

Épisode 35

mercredi 26 juin 2024 • Durée 09:52

Each week I arrived in my grid square with little idea what might capture my interest, but an increased certainty that something would. As with all good exploration, there were hints and hopes about what I’d find, but each square also surprised me.

This meant that if I found a square underwhelming, with little to interest me, the responsibility was likely to be mine. Was how much I saw dependent on how much I looked? Some squares buoyed my mood, while others merely matched it. A boring square wasn’t its fault; it was my fault. I knew that as I struggled lethargically round today’s streets, but I also excused myself on the grounds of illness.

I had sweated and shivered through the night, unable to sleep. In the morning, I went to make myself some toast, but we’d run out of bread. I dragged myself to the shed to do some work, but after an inef- fectual hour of pretending to write this book, I tried to salvage some- thing useful from the day by fetching my camera and cycling out to investigate a grid square.

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Solstice

Épisode 34

mercredi 19 juin 2024 • Durée 10:48

I sheltered beneath a large field maple tree, reframing my atti- tude to rain. Parking the grumbles and persuading myself instead how gleaming clean all the trees looked. Appreciating the gun-barrel-gran- ite skies. Remembering that a day in the rain is better than a day in the office. That kind of thing.

One of my favourite smells is the air after a storm, the earthy scent of petrichor, from the Greek words petros (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods). We tend to think that our sense of smell is something to be sniffed at compared with the animal world’s, but we are astonishing- ly adept at detecting geosmin, the chemical released by dead microbes that is responsible for the heady smells of petrichor and pools of water. We can smell geosmin at a level of five parts per trillion – that’s thou- sands of times more sensitive than sharks are to the scent of blood. We may be so sensitive to it because detecting water on the savannah where we evolved was a vital evolutionary advantage.

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Meadows

Épisode 33

mercredi 12 juin 2024 • Durée 08:57

I had a free morning and my latest grid square lay before me, begin- ning with the rare pleasure of a segregated cycle lane, safe from the busy road that sliced the square in half. I rode fast and free, blasting away the day’s earlier frustrations of waiting on the phone for an hour to speak to my electricity provider. Free at last! (Me, not the electric- ity.) North of the road, wheat fields ripened in the heat. South of the road lay a 1940s housing estate. The noisy road was once an important Roman route, though it was already an ancient thoroughfare by the time they arrived. I can’t begin to imagine what the traffic here will look like in another 2,000 years.

A row of houses had been built recently between the road and those wheat fields that had been forest back when the Romans carved through this land in the name of progress. The new-builds were extrav- agant expanses of glass and steel, with large gravel areas for parking multiple cars. Sparrows jostled noisily in pink rose bushes and pet- als fell among the squabbling. A placard in one garden campaigned

Meadows

against a ‘green belt grab’ that proposed to build 4,000 more homes around here. It summed up the difficulties of deciding where to build. This family was enjoying their new home but understandably didn’t want all the neighbouring fields to be built on as well. I don’t like the countryside being turned into towns, but I also want everyone to have a home. Answers on a postcard to your MP, please.

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Eclipse

Épisode 32

mercredi 5 juin 2024 • Durée 14:12

The map promised waterfalls. I was not expecting the 979 metres of Venezuela’s Angel Falls (named after the American explorer and pilot Jimmy Angel, whose plane crashed on Auyán-Tepuí in 1937), the volume of Inga Falls in the DRC (more than 46 million litres per second), or even the Denmark Strait cataract (an undersea waterfall plummeting unseen for 3,500 metres beneath the Atlantic Ocean). But the word ‘waterfall’ was not something I had expected to see annotated on my suburban lowland map, so I was excited to investigate.

My heart sank when I saw that the stream ran straight across a golf course. Golf courses are like a certain type of model. At first glance, your eyes light up at the swathes of undulating lushness. But your passion quickly plummets at the emptiness you find, the lack of nature beneath an artificial, preened veneer. The golf course did not bode well for my waterfalls.

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Flow

Épisode 31

samedi 1 juin 2024 • Durée 11:01

I dug out a pair of shorts to welcome in June. My legs shone ala- baster white, brighter than the day’s glorious sun. The lightness I felt inside made me aware of how sluggish I had been throughout the dark half of the year. Today, though, I was alert and enthusiastic. Even bet- ter, a chalk stream kissed the corner of today’s grid square. So I began there, with the banks shaded by overhanging willow trees and lined with pink foxgloves, and with the clear water burbling. Trout nosed into the current beneath an arched brick bridge with an inscription saying it had been rebuilt in 1773. While the fish were free to swim, a ‘Private Property’ sign chained across the river prohibited curious explorers from enjoying the stream.

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Swifts

Épisode 30

samedi 18 mai 2024 • Durée 14:01

I found an elevated spot where I could peep through the fence and look down on the new town being built across this blank grid square. Yet my map has never been blank. Even our brief history here stretches back hundreds of thousands of years to the Neanderthal hand axes dis- covered nearby, tools once used to butcher animals and make clothes. I’ve heard that sort of fact so often that it didn’t particularly astonish me. But learning that the axes were made by Homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species of archaic human, rather than by Homo sapiens, remind- ed me how rare it is for there to be just a single species within a genus (known as a monotypic genus). This is a dubious, lonely honour that we share with the dugong, narwhal, platypus, and not much else.

There used to be nine species of human. That we alone remain is testament to our aggressive, expansionist success, wiping out many species on our march to dominance, from dodos and all of Australia’s megafauna, to the recent ivory-billed woodpecker and splendid poison

Swifts

frog (the first two examples when I asked Google which species have gone extinct recently). We are uniquely dangerous.

But our success over the other Homo species was also down to our superior skills of communication and community. Yes, we wreck everything, but we are also well suited to fixing problems, if only we choose to do so. We need now to tell the stories that will ignite every- body to care about the perilous state of nature and the impact its col- lapse is having on people across the world. And then we need our local, national and international communities to work together to turn that around. Will we choose to balance our remorseless progress with con- cern and empathy?

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Buttercups

Épisode 29

dimanche 12 mai 2024 • Durée 11:08

You should sit in nature for twenty minutes every day, they say, unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour. I sat for a while on the bench on a small, triangular village green because I thought I was too busy to be doing this today. It was a cold and blustery morn- ing, so I was wearing a hat and gloves again and hunkering down into my collar. I’d hung all the washing on the line before heading out, but now it looked like it was going to pour with rain. I was also in a bit of a grump because this square looked dull on the map. But a few min- utes of stillness helped to settle me into a calmer mood and slowed my impatient mind.

A sign on the green said the village was supporting No Mow May, which explained why the grass was peppered with wildflowers. In Britain we revere short, stripy lawns. But the charity Plantlife urges us to enjoy the beauty and the wildlife benefits that come from allowing lawns, greens and verges to run a little wild for a month. After No Mow May, up to 200 species can be found flowering on lawns, including

Buttercups

such rarities as meadow saxifrage, knotted clover and eyebright, as well as an abundance of daisy, white clover and selfheal. The longer you leave a lawn unmown, the wider the range of plants, while cutting the grass every four weeks generates the greatest quantity of wildflowers and nectar.

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Local – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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