About Marcus
Peter Lascelles

The Back Seat, Circa 1989

I grew up in a house in Cheshire where the school holidays meant one thing: my father loading the Volvo estate with an OS map, a thermos flask, and a frankly optimistic quantity of egg sandwiches. We rarely went abroad. There was no particular philosophy behind that — it was simply what we did. Devon one summer, the Lake District the next, a sodden week in Northumberland that my mother still references whenever anyone mentions camping.

I spent most of those journeys in the back seat, face pressed to the glass, watching the landscape change in ways I couldn't yet articulate. The moment the motorway gave way to single-track lanes. The abrupt shift from flat Cheshire plain to the first real hills of the Peaks. The way the light in the north of England behaves differently — lower, more horizontal, almost suspicious. I filed all of it away without knowing I was doing so.

Leaving, and Coming Back

In my twenties I did what a lot of people do: I left. I spent a few years between London and various European cities, working in design, convincing myself that novelty was the same thing as depth. Paris was beautiful. Amsterdam was convenient. Neither of them felt like mine.

The move back north happened for personal reasons that I won't labour here — a relationship that ended, a job that had run its course, the usual furniture of a life being rearranged. I landed in Gateshead in 2014 with two suitcases and a mild sense of defeat that I didn't recognise at the time as the beginning of something genuinely useful.

Gateshead surprised me. The Tyne surprised me. The proximity to Northumberland, to Durham, to the coast — all of it within an hour in any direction — surprised me most of all. I started driving on weekends simply because I needed to move, to think. The car became a place where the noise quietened down.

The First Proper Drive

I remember the specific afternoon I stopped thinking of these trips as aimless. It was October 2015. I'd taken the A696 out towards Otterburn without any particular destination, turned off at a sign for a village whose name I'd never heard, and ended up parked beside a field gate, watching a pair of Cheviot sheep ignore a spectacular sky. I ate a service station pasty and felt, for the first time in a long while, completely content.

On the drive home I thought: I should write this down. Not because it was extraordinary — it wasn't. That was almost the point. The English countryside is full of these absolutely ordinary moments of quiet that somehow cut through. I wanted to record them before I forgot them, the way you forget dreams by mid-morning if you don't reach for a pen.

The Decision to Document

I resisted the word "blog" for a long time. It felt like a category I didn't belong in — too performative, too reliant on the assumption that other people wanted to watch you discover things they already knew. What I wanted was closer to a logbook. Notes to myself. Evidence that I'd been somewhere.

The site started in early 2017 as exactly that: handwritten entries transferred to a very basic WordPress installation, photographs taken on a camera I'd bought secondhand, no social media presence whatsoever. The first piece I published was about a pub in Allendale Town. It got eleven views, eight of which were almost certainly me checking that the formatting had worked.

Slowly, it grew. Not dramatically — I have no interest in dramatic growth for its own sake — but steadily, in the way that anything grows when you tend to it with consistency rather than urgency. People started writing to me. Mostly they'd say something like "I grew up near there" or "my grandmother used to take that road". That correspondence matters to me more than any traffic figure.

Where I Am Now

I'm still in Gateshead. The suitcases have long been unpacked. The car is a reliable but unglamorous diesel hatchback — not a romantic road trip vehicle by anyone's standards — and I drive it across England whenever I get the chance, which is most weekends and the occasional Tuesday if the weather looks promising.

I've covered a fair stretch of the country since that October afternoon near Otterburn. The Yorkshire Wolds in February, grey and vast and strangely moving. The Malvern Hills on a morning when the mist was doing extraordinary things to the light. Villages in Shropshire I can't spell reliably. The Fens, which I didn't expect to find beautiful but do, emphatically.

There's still a great deal of England I haven't seen. That's the part I find most encouraging. The roads don't run out. The lanes keep turning. There's always another signpost for somewhere I've never heard of, and that sense — of the country being larger and stranger and more interesting than you thought — is what gets me back in the car every time.

This site is the record of all of that. It isn't a guide, exactly, though I hope it's useful. It isn't a diary, though it's personal. It's the closest thing I've found to a way of paying attention — to place, to weather, to the particular quality of a Tuesday in rural Cumbria — and then setting it down before it fades.

— Marcus, Gateshead