‘Local’?

Isn’t that everything?

You need your own village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it{c}

You could argue that, on a small island like St Helena, everything is ‘local’, but you’d be wrong…

Explain?

St Helena is only 16 by 8 kilometres, or 121 km² (see our page How Small Is St Helena? to understand this better), and it takes under an hour to drive from one tip to the other{1}, so surely everything could be considered as ‘local’? And yet, even within such a tiny area (1/13 the size of Greater London{2}, for example) local places have local ‘personalities’:

• Blue Hill, for example, was until motorised transport, a day’s journey from Jamestown. People left home before dawn and arrived home after dark when making the journey. This made Blue Hill quite self-reliant. Many rarely left the district. People grew vegetables for their own use and bartered the surplus with neighbours, or sometimes sold it via the Blue Hill shop. There was a pub; a dance hall (the Community Centre, and prior to that the school); and a local church. So Blue Hill developed a local character and even a distinguishable accent. And even now that a vehicle can travel to Town in 30-40 minutes, much of that local flavour still exists.

• Sandy Bay, like Blue Hill, was isolated and self-reliant, and to some extent still is.

• The same, for similar reasons, applies to Levelwood, and to a lesser extent to Longwood though this area was always part of the ‘tourist route’ due to the Napoleonic sites. Some refer to the Longwood/Bottom Woods area as ‘Little Texas’, because of the strong preference for Country Music and its styles of dress.

• Alarm Forest is seen as an up-and-coming place to live, where those who can afford it build their homes. The same applies for The Briars. This of itself generates a rather separated community.

• Jamestown used to be where most people lived and was a thriving almost-metropolitan community, but much less so today. It can be unpleasantly hot in the summer (though not really cold in winter) and this plus the noise and the shortage of space leaves the few remaing residents somewhat beleaguered.

Most of these differences are not immediately apparent. After you’ve lived here for a while you learn to spot where people live, or were brought up, by the way they behave. All this on 16 by 8 kilometres, or 121 km² (see our page How Small Is St Helena? to understand this better)!

So if you advertise a dance in Blue Hill, you can be reasonably sure that most of the people who turn up will have travelled fewer than 3Km. This is not because of drink-driving restrictions{3}. It’s just that your event will be seen as a local event and non-locals, though doubtless no less welcome, feel it is not for them.

The editor of this website was once told by someone living in Longwood that she felt isolated from her roots; she had grown up in New Ground in St Pauls, just 4Km away…

Where people live