Issue #114: How to find community on your doorstep

From making local friends to forming deeper connections with your neighbours. Featuring an interview with writer Rosie Spinks.

'Community doesn't just arrive – it's an active process' - Rosie Spinks [Credit: Alex Baxter]

‘Imagine if we all lived in a village together.’ The other day, I was sat with close friends on a sun-drenched rooftop in east London, fantasising about living in easy proximity of each other. The reality couldn’t be more different: said rooftop was around 45 minutes from each of our respective homes, which in turn are in opposite corners of the capital. For those of us living in large cities, this mutually-inconvenient meeting place is a familiar scenario.

Despite many of my friends living at least a Tube journey away, forming connections within walking distance is something I’ve thought about often in recent years - and something I’m still seeking more of. Ever since I went freelance at the beginning of lockdown, having a sense of local community has been more than a nice-to-have. Some days, a spontaneous walk with a neighbour, or a friendly exchange with someone at my yoga studio might be my only social contact. It’s the difference between a flat social battery, and a gently-charged one.

It’s a feeling

Rosie Spinks

, author of Substack-featured publication

What Do We Do Now That We're Here?

, knows only too well. Rosie, who grew up in California and has lived in various countries, together with Margate and London in the UK. When Rosie moved to a ‘village-y suburb’ in north Leeds last year with her husband, she suddenly felt an acute need to local connections.

For the first time in my life, I really felt viscerally the absence of people that I saw regularly and who could support me, and vice versa. I would open my phone, looking for someone to talk to. But I didn’t want to text some and say, ‘I'm struggling.’ I wanted people to go for walks with, or just people to run into who, when they asked me how I'm doing today, I could be like, actually, I'm not doing great. And I’d think to myself: I should have that built into my life.

So how do you begin to build that people-based infrastructure into your life? How do you meet your neighbours? How do you turn interactions from trivial to meaningful? How do you go about asking near-strangers for favours - and let them know you’d like to do the same for them? These are the sorts of questions that inform Rosie’s most-read pieces on Substack, including ‘How to build a village’.

I should mention at this point that Rosie is a mother-of-one. And yet, so much of her work, such as her essays on seeking connection; loneliness; the need for local community, resonates with me, someone in an entirely different life stage to Rosie (i.e. single, living alone, childfree vs. married, cohabiting and a mother).

That’s exactly why she made the decision to avoid focusing on the experience of motherhood in her writing, she tells me: ‘I discovered this need [for connection] through motherhood, but it’s not exclusive to parents. In early parenthood, we think our problems belong only to parents – much like people who live alone and feel disconnected or left out think those problems belong exclusively to them.’

Join me for a guided journaling workshop

The way Rosie sees it, it’s ‘the same problem’. Not only that, but ‘both groups have the same problem, and actually that means they have the solution for each other.’

Back to the question: where do we begin? Later in this issue, I share:

• Rosie’s best advice for connecting with your local community

• A link to the full-length transcript of our conversation

• Bonus advice from other writers I love, plus a list of resources