I grew up in Nottingham. This is not a statement that typically carries much aesthetic weight. Nottingham is not Milan. It's not Copenhagen. It's not Tokyo. It's a mid-sized city in the East Midlands with a shopping centre, a castle, and a complicated relationship with Robin Hood. If you're picturing a design mecca, adjust your expectations.
But Nottingham shaped my taste in ways I'm only now beginning to understand, two decades and a hundred miles of southward migration later. The city gave me Paul Smith - literally, his first shop opened there, and his particular brand of classic-with-a-twist runs through Nottingham's creative DNA like a recurring motif. It gave me football culture, which is its own aesthetic universe - the programmes, the scarves, the stadium architecture, the graphic language of a matchday. It gave me the high street as gallery, browsing HMV and WHSmith and the newsagent on the corner where I'd stand reading magazine covers I couldn't afford.
All of this before I knew what "taste" was. Before I had any framework for thinking about aesthetics. The city was writing my preferences before I had the vocabulary to read them.
The postcode of your eye
There's a reason Scandinavian design looks the way it does. The long winters, the limited light, the relationship with natural materials born from geography and climate - these aren't incidental to the aesthetic. They are the aesthetic. The warm woods, the candles, the functional simplicity isn't a style choice made in a vacuum. It's a response to place. A solution that became a sensibility.
The same is true everywhere. Japanese packaging design - that extraordinary density of information and colour that I'm obsessed with - didn't emerge from a brief. It emerged from konbini culture, from small retail spaces where products compete at arm's length, from a society that values information as a form of respect for the consumer. The maximalism isn't excess. It's context.
New York design has an urgency to it - bold, loud, immediate - because the city is urgent. You have three seconds to capture attention on a subway platform. Subtlety is a luxury for places with quieter streets. Los Angeles design skews spacious and sun-bleached because the city is spacious and sun-bleached. The environment becomes the mood board before anyone opens Figma.
Moving cities, moving taste
When I moved to London in my early twenties, I didn't realise I was signing up for a taste transplant. But London does something specific to the way you see. The city is layered - Georgian next to Brutalist next to glass-and-steel next to Victorian, often on the same street. It teaches you to hold contradictions. To appreciate the ornate and the industrial, the polished and the rough, the ancient and the brand new, all within a single walk.
Nottingham had given me loyalty, consistency, the value of the unpretentious. London gave me range. It taught me that good design doesn't have a single correct answer. That a Georgian townhouse and the Barbican Centre can both be beautiful, for entirely different reasons. That taste isn't a fixed position - it's a capacity to recognise quality across different registers.
I've worked in agencies across London for fifteen years, and I've watched this play out with colleagues. The ones from small towns brought an instinct for clarity - cut the noise, say the thing, don't over-complicate it. The ones from big cities brought sophistication and edge. The ones who'd lived abroad brought references that surprised everyone else. The best teams weren't the ones with the most talent. They were the ones with the most geographic diversity. More postcodes, more perspectives, better work.
The internet flattened geography. Mostly.
There's an argument that none of this matters any more. That the internet gave everyone access to everything, and a kid in Nottingham now has the same visual inputs as a kid in Brooklyn. Technically, that's true. Practically, it's not.
Because taste isn't just what you see. It's what you touch, what you walk through, what you live inside. You can browse Japanese convenience stores on Instagram all day, but you haven't felt the sliding door, smelled the oden, navigated the aisles, experienced the density as a physical reality. The screen gives you the image. The place gives you the feeling. And it's the feeling that becomes taste.
The internet has expanded everyone's reference library, which is genuinely wonderful. But it's also created a kind of aesthetic esperanto - a global default that flattens regional character into sameness. Every coffee shop in every city now looks like every other coffee shop. Subway tile, Edison bulbs, pour-over, Helvetica on the menu board. It's fine. It's always fine. But it's nowhere. It belongs to no place. It has no postcode.
Designing with somewhere in mind
The best brands understand this. They know where they're from, and they let that show. Patagonia is Ventura, California - the outdoor culture, the environmental consciousness, the relaxed functionality. It couldn't be from anywhere else. Muji is Tokyo - the restraint, the respect for materials, the quiet confidence. Even Apple, for all its global ubiquity, is unmistakably Californian - optimistic, clean, a bit evangelical about its own simplicity.
When I build my own projects, I try to think about this. Modern Retro draws from 1970s British and American retail - a specific time and a specific geography of shopping centres, petrol stations, and high streets that had character before chains homogenised everything. The aesthetic has a postcode. It belongs somewhere, even if that somewhere is half a century ago.
My restaurant guides are specifically, unapologetically London. Not "urban." Not "metropolitan." London. The pub guide smells of cask ale and old carpet. Oishii is the particular magic of Japanese food culture filtered through a specific set of London streets. These projects work because they're rooted in place, not floating in the algorithmic nowhere of generic "lifestyle" content.
Carry your map
I think the most interesting creative people are the ones who carry their geography visibly. Virgil Abloh carried Rockford, Illinois and Chicago and Ghana simultaneously - that improbable combination of references produced work that couldn't have come from anyone else's coordinates. Paul Smith still carries Nottingham, sixty years on. The stripe, the wit, the refusal to take menswear too seriously - that's Midlands energy, whether he'd call it that or not.
Your taste is your map. It shows everywhere you've been and everything you've absorbed from each stop. The trick isn't to erase the early coordinates in favour of more fashionable ones. It's to understand what each place gave you and to use the whole map, not just the parts that look good on a mood board.
I'm from Nottingham. I live in London. I'm obsessed with Tokyo. And the view from that particular triangle - provincial, cosmopolitan, aspirational - is mine. It's where my taste lives. Not in any single corner, but in the tension between all three.
