I grew up in Nottingham. Not the Robin Hood, tourist-brochure version of Nottingham. The real one. The one with two football clubs, a decent high street, great pubs, and the quiet, persistent feeling that the interesting stuff was happening somewhere else. Probably London. Definitely London.
Nottingham is a good city. I want to be clear about that. It has character, it has community, it has a pride that you don't find in places trying to be something they aren't. But it's also a city that teaches you, very early, what it means to be outside the centre. To watch things happen on a screen that are happening in real time in a place you can't get to. To read about scenes and movements and cultural moments that require a postcode you don't have.
That feeling - of being close enough to see it but too far away to touch it - is the most formative experience of my creative life. And I didn't understand that until I left.
The hunger of the periphery
Growing up outside the cultural centre gives you a hunger that people who grew up inside it rarely develop. When you're in London, culture comes to you. It's in the air, on the walls, in the conversations at the next table. You absorb it by osmosis. You don't need to seek it out because it finds you. But when you're in Nottingham, you have to hunt for it. You have to be deliberate. You have to buy the magazine, find the website, seek out the reference, build your own connection to the things that matter to you.
That deliberateness is a gift, even if it doesn't feel like one at the time. It turns consumption into curation. When you can't have everything, you learn to choose carefully. When access is limited, you value what you find. When you have to work to discover something, you remember it more deeply than if it had been handed to you.
My magazine obsession started in Nottingham. The Face, i-D, Dazed - these weren't casual purchases. They were expeditions. Each issue was a window into a world I wanted to be part of but couldn't yet access. I would read them cover to cover, absorb every image, every reference, every name. Not because I was unusually dedicated, but because these magazines were my only connection to a creative culture that felt tantalisingly out of reach.
Forest and identity
You can't talk about Nottingham without talking about Forest. Nottingham Forest isn't just a football club I support. It's a foundational piece of who I'm. In a way that people from big cities sometimes struggle to understand, your football club in a place like Nottingham IS the city. It's the thing that puts you on the map. It's the shared experience that connects you to everyone else who grew up there. It's the thing you take with you when you leave.
Supporting Forest teaches you something about loyalty and about finding meaning in things that don't always reward you for caring. For most of my life, Forest weren't a glamour club. They were in the lower divisions, playing in half-empty stadiums, a long way from the European Cup nights of Brian Clough's era. Supporting them was an act of stubbornness, not convenience. You did it because they were yours, not because they were winning.
That stubbornness - caring about something because it's yours, not because it's fashionable - runs through everything I do. I built a pub guide because I love pubs, not because pub guides are trendy. I built a Japanese food guide because I love Japanese food, not because it was a gap in the market. The things I build come from genuine care, and that instinct started with standing on the terraces at the City Ground on grey Saturday afternoons, caring fiercely about something that most of the world had stopped paying attention to.
Arriving in London
Moving to London was like someone turned the volume up on everything. More people, more food, more culture, more noise, more opportunity, more competition. Everything I had been reaching for from a distance was suddenly right there, within walking distance, happening every night of the week. It was overwhelming and exhilarating in equal measure.
The thing that surprised me most was how many other people had made the same journey. London is full of people from Nottingham, from Birmingham, from Leeds, from Manchester, from Newcastle, from Cardiff, from every city in the country that's big enough to give you ambition but too small to satisfy it. There's an unspoken bond between these people. A shared understanding of what it means to have arrived from somewhere else and be building a life in a city that doesn't owe you anything.
That hunger - the Nottingham hunger, the outside-looking-in hunger - never fully goes away. Even now, years into living in London, I still have the instinct of someone who came from somewhere else. The instinct to not take it for granted. The instinct to consume deliberately rather than passively. The instinct to build things because I still can't quite believe I have the tools and the access and the opportunity to do it.
What Nottingham gave me
Nottingham gave me taste without pretension. In a small city, you can't afford to be precious about culture. You take what's available and you find the good in it. You develop opinions without having a scene to validate them. You learn to trust your own judgment because there's nobody around to tell you what's cool and what isn't. That self-reliance - the confidence to say "I think this is good" without needing a consensus - is the foundation of everything I do now.
Nottingham gave me range. When you grow up somewhere that doesn't specialise, neither do you. I didn't become a "fashion person" or a "music person" or a "design person" because Nottingham didn't have distinct enough scenes to funnel you into one lane. Instead, I became interested in all of it - fashion, music, design, food, sport, technology, culture in its broadest possible definition. That range, which might look like a lack of focus to someone who grew up in a more specialised environment, is actually my biggest strength.
And Nottingham gave me Forest. Which gave me loyalty. Which gave me the understanding that caring about something deeply, even when it isn't rewarded, isn't foolish. It is the point. Every product I build, I build with that same loyalty. Not because the world needs another pub guide, but because I care about pubs, and that care is worth expressing, and expressing it through building is the most honest thing I know how to do.
I live in London now. My son is growing up here. He'll be a London kid, not a Nottingham kid, and that's a different thing entirely. But the Nottingham in me - the hunger, the taste, the stubbornness, the loyalty - is in everything I build. You can take the boy out of Nottingham, as they say. But the City Ground stays with you forever.
