Back in 2015, 26 of our writers were partnered with 26 carefully selected postcodes, each with a literary significance (Shakespeare’s birthplace, the home of Wordsworth, and so on). Returning to the idea 10 years on in 2025, a further seven writers have picked locations, now focussing on places that mean something to them.
What locations have had an impact (large or small) on your life?
As the team wrote back in 2015: A good writer can find inspiration anywhere –
Just pick a postcode.
Max
Julia Webb-Harvey
“SW1H 9NE”
Life is measured in time, the years passing. Events marked on a calendar, the photographs taken. They become the fabric of memories, laid in layers of the mind like sedimentary rocks. Fossil memories are excavated and examined – Do you remember when?
Anushka Shah
“NG”
With my parents having recently put their house on the market, announcing plans to move out of Nottinghamshire altogether, I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood home and the hours my brother and I used to while away in the garden…
Rob Briggs
“EH3: The Stockbridge Spectacular”
Market my words
Come on inside
Spectacular Stockbridge has nothing to hide…
Joe Spence
“SL2 4NZ”
The hot Summer of ’76 –
I remember, I remember
A bookish teenager –
A literary pilgrimage
Joan Lennon
“EH7 5EA”
Hillside Crescent Gardens, designed by William Henry Playfair. The trees were planted 200 years ago. Today you can adopt a tree…
Chloe Green
“OX1 1DP”
summer’s dust has turned to mud beneath leaf-fall carpet – orange, red. we toss sticks into the flood, the river’s mouth is hungry, fed...
Max Parfitt
“SW2 2QP”
Sometimes I see it like a doll’s house –
walls lifted away, each room kept exactly as I remember it…
Irene Lofthouse: An extra reflection on place.
Place.
Mijet, Croatia.
An activity package holiday where I wasn’t doing the activities.
Instead I strolled around this beautiful island of wild herbs, watching bins being emptied by a meandering mongoose, and swimming in the clearest water I’d ever seen over to St Mary’s Island.
All by myself.
Conjuring Greek and Roman myths, gods, goddesses and wondering which one had become the mongoose.
– Irene Lofthouse