Home Coming: Otley, West Yorkshire

If you tell someone from Leeds that you’re from Otley they’ll often respond with: “Are you inbred?” Which isn’t funny, not because it’s offensive, but because everyone makes that joke about small towns. Though coming back here, I have to admit that you do notice a lot of the same names on the sides of vans.

The second and the slightly more common response is for people to say, “Oh I’ve been there,” when what they really mean is that they’ve been on the Otley Run – a pub crawl where you wear fancy dress and have a pint in each of the 15 pubs along the route from the Leeds suburb of Headingley to the city centre. It doesn’t begin in Otley, but somewhere on Otley Road, which is where the confusion comes in. 

I’m actually not even from Otley, but three miles away: an even smaller place called Pool, although there’s literally no point saying that to people because almost no one has heard of it. Understandably, given that now – eight years after I left to go to university – the place still has only a Shell garage, a post office, a roundabout and a pub with really overpriced wine. 

Sometimes I feel a bit weird saying I’m from either of these places at all. Like I’ve invented a past for myself I’m desperately trying to make ventriloquise my body. The land here doesn't recognise me, on my return I misjudge the jumps over muddy puddles, get lost and have to pull Google maps up. I don’t drop my t’s anymore like most people from Yorkshire, but feel them jutting out clear and crispy from under my teeth. I’m a stranger to Otley, which is sad because I’ve always wanted to be one of its daughters. 

My family moved out here from Headingley when I was about 11 because my parents were left-wing enough not to want to send me to a private school, but aspirational enough to move somewhere where the state schools were better. They had that strong midlife crisis urge to renovate a house, because they wanted to leave their stamp on a place and also to ensure they always had something to moan about. The house was terrifying'; there was nicotine dripping down the walls because the woman living here prior to us chain smoked and never opened a window. There were all these tiny rooms downstairs, airing cupboards and weird things like a bathroom right next to another bathroom, sinks in all the bedrooms, crazy patterned carpets which you’d get a headache from looking at for too long. One time a man rang up to say that his dad was buried in the garden and he was coming to dig him up. 

But I did get the best bedroom in the house because as fellow spoilt blonde Regina George says in Mean Girls: “It was my parents' room, but I made them trade me.” Day by day my mum and dad gradually stripped the wallpaper, painted over the plaster in the muted pastels of Farrow and Ball, installed glittering glass light fittings, and doubled down on nonsensical but aesthetic decisions like facing all the sofas towards each other rather than towards the TV as if all we did in the living room was debate religion. I wasn’t allowed a trampoline because Dad didn’t want it to turn the lawn underneath yellow, but I did get a wooden treehouse. And gradually the place became so perfect – and I’m not asking for sympathy here – that I used to get off the school bus two stops away because I didn’t want people to think, or know, that I was a bit posh. 

After that first summer, I started at Prince Henry’s school in Otley and that’s when I began to really get to know the place. There was and is a lot going on, though granted none of it is stuff you want to do as a kid growing up. There are reading clubs and camera clubs, amateur radio clubs, allotment societies, morris dancing. Otley’s small enough that apart from Greggs and Costa, no chains have bothered to set up in the town. The butchers here are always winning national awards you’ve never heard of, things like “Supreme Pork Pie Champion”, while Bondgate Bakery’s bread is so good they supply Harvey Nichols. Otley plays the fictional town of Hotton in Emmerdale. And the sandstone from the long-closed quarry was used to build the foundations of the houses of parliament.

Otley also has the greatest number of pubs per head in the UK (21 for 15,000 people). This is the result of what might be the only good thing a Lib Dem has ever done: When MP Greg Mulholland was in charge in 2015 (Otley’s now Labour again) he listed pubs as “assets of community value” or ACVs. This means that before any pub can be sold off, the local community is given six months to bid for the property to prevent it being converted into a bank or office or something equally miserable.

Despite all these charming details, Otley lies outside of Yorkshire’s “golden triangle”, which is a term estate agents of the region use to denote the affluent realm that lies between York, North Leeds and Harrogate. This triangle encompasses places like Fullwith Mill Lane, where house prices average out at £1.7 million. I’m not sure if it’s a real saying or just something my mum made up, but apparently Otley lies in a “silver triangle”, an area where you won’t see so many white jeans or Barbour jackets.

It could get fancier here if it wanted to. There’s a campaign to get the lido back that the council could invest in, rather than relying on mums to share the GoFundMe page on Facebook. The town would grow if there was a train line into Leeds, but people around here don’t seem to like change much.

I find it hard to imagine how gentrification would fare against the squat blackened bricks of the town. All I can picture are new signs peeling and shop frontages crumbling under the resistance from a place that knows what it wants. The Chevin, a large mountainous ridge stretches up and around the town like a protective arm blocking the outside world out. My dad said that the first time he picked up the phone after relocating here this guy asked where he was from and when he answered “London” the man said, “Well you’ll be welcome in about the next 300 to 400 years.” Looking at old pictures of Otley, it’s barely changed since there were cows for sale in the market square. I’m glad – it’s perfect just the way it is.

My memories of the place are so clear that sometimes when I think of them it’s like I’m right back in that moment having never left. Walking out of school at lunchtime to the (now demolished) 2/5 health-rated Dunnies biker cafe, where my friends would steal all the buttered bread they had at the end of the counter for people who’d paid for chip butties. I remember sitting on the picnic benches outside on a sweltering day and some leering man leaning too close to me asking, “Do they not have paper at Prince Henry’s?” because I had all these words scribbled in biro over my hands.

Me and my friend Ella discovered this beach at the end of a farmer’s field. We’d go swimming in the river and scream as the freezing water cramped up our feet and slapped against our stomachs. Once you got used to the temperature, the place felt so blissful that sometimes I’d let myself imagine I was on the Amalfi coast. Willow trees leaning down and skimming the water, the sun dappling the softly lapping waves and when you get out there’s white sand to doze off on. A few times we went and the water was teeming with those fish that used to eat your dead foot skin in tanks at shopping centres, promoted as “a pedicure”, back in the 2010s. 

I was an emo at school so not many people liked me, but then I made friends with one of the cooler girls because we sat next to each other in science. I started getting invited to parties. You could still get MCAT over the counter then and we did embarrassing things because we’d not learned that you don’t need to go along with every idea drugs give you. One time the guys took their tops off and were getting my friend to scratch their backs with her acrylic nails because it felt nice and then all of them had long pink raspberry ripple streaks up and down their skin. Someone handing me bread with loads of butter and salt on. A guy passed out and everyone using his head as an ashtray.

I didn’t pine after nights out in Leeds, I just wanted to be in Otley. That was where everyone was. So it seemed well worth the effort the times we had to get the X84 bus 45 minutes into Leeds – to visit the only off licence that would serve you underage – only to jump right back on the bus and head all the way back again.

There was a period of time when I was about 17 where everyone from school would venture out to Paul’s Pond in nearby Adel. We’d make a fire and someone who had a part-time job at Pizza Express would bring their Bluetooth speaker and we’d dance around with fishermen staring over the dark water at us. One time a couple of us ended up wandering around the corridors of the Mecure Leeds Parkway Hotel opposite wondering if we could sleep there. I remember thinking, ‘This is fucking cool isn’t it.’ 

As the years went by, I learned more and more about this place. That you should bring your own ketchup to Pizza Base because they charged you for it. We found a stone hut which served as a makeshift meeting place. The more things I did there the more the ground under me felt like mine, as though the only reason it existed was for me to have something to rest my feet on. But I still felt a lot of distance and I blamed most of that on my overprotective parents. Now I understand how young I was and how watching me throwing up two-litre bottles of Frosty Jacks most Saturday evenings would have been terrifying. Like all children though, I felt like an adult. 

I remember once after we’d been to a gig at Otley Courthouse, some friends and I were taking turns going in two’s down the metal slide in the kid’s playground. It was about 1AM and we’d made some pact to sleep in the park. Mum rang me and I told her I was staying over at someone’s, but it didn’t take her long to work out where I actually was. She came to get me and asked everyone else to come back to mine with us. They all said no. I said she didn’t understand. It sounds stupid that I complained about my mum not letting me sleep in a park. But I knew that it was wrong that I wasn’t allowed to make stupid decisions. The lack of them prevented me from experiencing things, things which would have transformed the park from a patch of grass to the place where I saw all the shapes the stars can make across the sky, heard how quiet the world can get when you’re the only ones out in it, got so cold I realised sleeping outside isn’t fun and found a way to safety.

I sat in the passenger seat on the way home with my head stuck against the window quietly enraged. I felt like I was trying to breathe under a pile of bricks. I heard the next day from my best friend Vicky that all five of them had slept knotted up in the bed of this guy called Winston. “You didn’t miss much,” she said, though I could tell how much I was losing.

 The love my parents gave me was so huge, so overwhelming it came out of their chests like the airbags in cars. Always being saved made my personality different from the people here, a lot softer. I’m permanently unsure of myself, always letting other people take the lead. I hate expressing a preference about anything and always agree with other people, as I never learned to test if my choices were the right ones. At restaurants, I copy what other people order. Sometimes I wonder if I have any opinions at all, because they change constantly based on whatever I last read. People in Otley are the opposite: They rarely change their minds, they’re brusk with sharp edges, or as The Guardian put it once “Otley folk aren't backwards in coming forwards.” They take no prisoners. 

It might not have been my parents’ love, it might have been the three mile gap between my home and Otley, or the silver spoon that was in my mouth. Whatever it was, I’m cringeworthy compared to a lot of people from the town. So easily bruised, I’m like a peach you could press through my skin all the way to the core. A lot of people from here have walls. They’re stoic and buttoned-up and know that to be soft is to be at risk. 

When we were at school everyone started using the word “rough” in a new way. It could mean almost anything depending on pronunciation, but primarily it stood for anything try-hard. That could be someone saying “I love drum and bass” or blowing intricate smoke rings from a joint, but as time went on it was used for anything earnest. Eventually being nervous about an exam was rough, or wanting to learn how to play an instrument, thinking, feeling. I got called rough a lot.

I’m petrified of offending people, not that that means I do it any less. People from Otley have made an art-form of it. They love you by reducing your personality to a pulp. In highlighting your faults, they show that they want all of you – not just the good bits. 

Like when I was at my friend from Otley’s birthday the other night where she hired a hot tub. Everyone said “Annie, don’t get too excited, we know how you get around water!”, because they know I used to use the shower head to wank with. They asked me if I was vlogging when they got bored of me taking pictures. And when we were in the water and I said, “Can we relax? Aaron’s worrying about the filter, Moll’s thinking about the dog”, before I could finish Vicky chimed in: “And you’re sat here thinking about the chlorine turning your hair extensions green.” Which of course I was.

 People always think that the person who leaves the small town is the one who made it. A couple of times I’ve been asked in interviews what people from home think about what I do, as if any of them care. Sometimes they say “you’re doing well aren’t you?” but then they follow that up with “I couldn’t live in London, me”, they mention how boring night’s out there are or complain about how busy the tube is. My mum said a woman at a train station once said to her: “Yorkshire men are like salmon, they always come home to spawn”. 

It’s true: Anyone who leaves hears the town, warm and womb-like, calling. Calling them back to pubs where their friend’s mum tells them to get a round in, to high peaks where you can see the dry stone walls zig-zagging across the endless expanse of green all the way to the point where the land reaches up to the sky. The narrative of “success” most of us subscribe to contextualises things in terms of ladders. Stick or twist, the twisters being the brave ones.

But why is it better to leave? What’s so bad about small worlds? Ones where you’re only ever a couple of streets away from someone who cares about you, who knows how you like your tea. What could be better than staying somewhere so long that you can draw the cracks in a single paving stone from memory? Than loving something so much you don’t care about what might be better. Staying here is like finding a dish on the menu you really love and never being tempted to try anything different, because it’s always exactly what you’re in the mood for. 

It was easier for me to leave Otley because I was never wholly a part of it. Ironically, it was only by leaving and going to university that I started to feel more connected to the town. The subtle markers of my growing up there stuck out to people who’d never heard a voice like mine. I remember telling some girl I  “just got a kebab” after leaving the night before, she parroted my words back to me: “JUST GOT A KEBAB!” I didn’t realise it was because she thought I sounded Northern.

I’d only ever had people laugh at how posh I sounded. I got blocked out of conversations – as in physically blocked by people who would move to stand in front of me – and it took me a while to realise that it was because they were snobs. I wore lots of makeup: brown eyeshadow smudged high up to my eyebrow, fake eyelashes just for lectures. It was a level of preening that’s celebrated in the north but had become unfashionable among the Flo’s and Poppy’s who’d come up from the Home Counties in hoodies and puffa jackets. Someone asked me if I knew what parma ham was. 

I enjoyed being othered in this way, because it was something I’d never lived with like my friends from home had. I felt Otley on my skin and in the food I ate: complaining that takeaways didn’t offer scraps with the chips automatically, rolling my eyes when people said stuff like “you’ve nosed the brie”. I told everyone that back home people said “me sen” instead of myself. I revelled in the large amount of booze it took me to get drunk and drank so much tea I might as well have gotten it via an IV drip. I wore Otley on me in the chipped nail polish and short dresses. Spoke it in Yorkshire chants and the way I’d play dumb about things I actually knew.

Of course these things don’t represent Otley. They’re the caricatures of a place drawn by people who’ve never been. A whole landscape reduced to an easily digestible anecdote. But for a short time I felt I could be more from there, or at least someone’s idea of what “there” was, by acting up to scripts written by outsiders. 

I felt closer to Otley at university, but I was only being drawn further and further away from its influence. My accent changed, “ah” sounds replaced with “ar” sounds. I wore cargo pants and Nikes on nights out and took out my hair extensions. I started saying dumb shit like “it’s subjective”, when of course almost all things are. I thought conversations had to be battles that you won by being able to reference a book by someone old.

I’m not saying people from Otley aren’t clever, but common sense, wit, good stories, are what is valued. They humble you when you’re trying too hard. They tell you to shut the fuck up. I started to want more and more. Bigger became better. I would see who the coolest person in the room was and want to get closer to them. I became really fucking charming in that way private school people are, asking the right questions and making people feel important by holding very intense eye contact and saying their name a lot. 

I’m older now and more confident. My body doesn’t change in response to the shapes others want to mould it into. The glam has been piled back on. I’m better at rinsing people’s personalities. 

I still feel weird when I say where I’m from, following it up with a “Yeah, I’ve just got a shit accent”, or by making some lukewarm joke about my fake tan being the only Northern thing about me. But there are some moments where I feel myself being called back to this place, like one of those salmon.

Not long ago a friend from the south had come up to visit and we went on a walk through a field left waterlogged and boggy by recent rain. I leaped over each puddle, watching frustratedly as her eyes ran forwards and back trying to judge the distances. “City girl”, I said. “Alright Sean Bean,” she replied. I could tell that she hadn’t seen a caricature, or a stereotype, she’d seen me and the way I felt with this land under my feet. And though the south isn’t that far, between us a gap stretched out and in that space were all the things that showed I was from here and she was from there. And I thought to myself: ‘There's so much more home in you when you're around someone who's never been.’

Around outsiders, I stink of the place. It runs right the way down to the marrow of my bones. It comes up hot and proud in my chest like I were holding a hot water bottle against it. Perhaps that’s why I like staying away from Otley because in leaving it I can feel it in me always in the eyes of others. Only by swimming away have I found my way back. It feels good to be home.

@annielord8 / @cbethell_photo