Here is a story as I’ve learned it over the years. In the 1970s the English Milk Marketing Board bought every drop of milk produced by dairy farmers. As the farmers were also subsidised to produce the milk, there was surplus to demand. The Board decided to make and sell a cheese “to rival the French Brie”. Advertising Executives were engaged. They planned to market the product as though it was made in an archetypal village. They named the fictitious village Wymeswold.

Wymeswold Cheese became Lymeswold Cheese when they discovered that their imaginary village did in fact exist. Some years ago, I found a tea-towel for Lymeswold Cheese on Ebay. It shows a church at the heart of the village, rising above a stream and cottages. It does look a bit like Wymeswold: our church sits on a mound above the newsagent adjacent to a triangle of grass in ‘The Stockwell’. Maybe Wymeswold is the archetypal English village, or more probably, this is just a blueprint for English villages.

Anyway, as the story goes, initially the cheese was popular. Demand outstripped supply. There were issues producing and storing the cheese. The cheese was not being produced by age-old methods developed over generations. Famously, it tasted dreadful. Today, Lymeswold lives on as an illustration of shit English food, fake countryside and absurd post-war agricultural policy. It became a recurring joke in Private Eye. When I say where I’m from, people sometimes ask me if Lymeswold cheese was made in Wymeswold. Fiction upon fiction.

I tell this story because in the first sentence of this biography, I’m staking a claim to be rural, but I’m also not sure I’m rural enough. I was born in Nottingham; we moved to Wymeswold when I was six. I went to school in Loughborough. My childhood was characterised by journeys up and down the A60, sometimes multiple times a day. My parents commuted to work: Wymeswold was perfectly situated for the East Midlands middle class, in the centre of a triangle between the cities of Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.

As ‘incomers’ we spoke of generational Wymeswold families with a kind of reverence: the Collingtons who ran the butchers were one. Collingtons’ Butchers later closed, like the Post Office, which is now a pretty house framed by with wisteria. Friends of my parents live in one of the former outbuildings of the butchers, which is now a high spec residential property. I feel sad about these changes and our role in them. One of my treasured possessions from my childhood is a project I made on the village; it includes fold-out windows into shops, such as the seven historic pubs now reduced to three. I even interviewed the headteacher of the state village primary (as a pupil of a private primary school in Loughborough). It makes me wince today.

But maybe the point of Lymeswold is that we all tell stories. It’s all narrative. The countryside is an idea, rooted in experience. Ideas are powerful. One evening last week I drove over to see my parents, who still live in Wymeswold. As I entered the village I heard church bells. Ah yes, I thought. It is Tuesday. I fell asleep to bell-ringing practice on Tuesdays over thirty years ago. Later that evening, after chatting to my parents I fell into a deep, dreamy sleep, the kind that comes rarely to me in 2026, a parent in my forties. ↩︎

The Ruskin School of Fine Art has now dropped ‘Drawing’ from its title, but it’s an important detail to me. We drew cadavers with Sarah Simblett at the medical school in Anatomy and created a skeleton of an imagined creature (mine was a mammalian man-eating triffid plant). We had access to free life drawing classes and a first-year drawing programme. After the Ruskin, I met an alumni who’d been a student thirty years before. He told me that he hadn’t been allowed to use colour for a term, and students were threatened with failure for using an eraser in the drawing exam. From my era, the sessions I remember are the ones which subverted the discipline. Mark Dean asked us to respond to Rip it Up by Orange Juice (I was annoyed it wasn’t observational drawing). Joby Williamson took us by bus to the Oxford suburb of Cowley. I think he gave us a pound to find something in a charity shop.
In my second year my drawings expanded from observational line drawings to installations: I drew between negative spaces. One holiday, at my aunt and uncle’s farm in mid-Wales, I tied white elastic to branches of trees in the orchard, pegging it into the ground. The installation vibrated in the wind like a monumental, silent harp (Pen Orchestra).
Back in Oxford, during my college’s Arts Week, I suspended a giant inflatable black ball, like an ink spot or a punctuation mark, across the quadrangle (Brasenose Ball). Ruskin students were, somewhat incongruently, part of university colleges, where we lived alongside students studying more conventional, academic subjects. The thick elastic which tied the ball between the buildings cast a shadow on the hallowed grass of the quadrangle, as though I’d drawn on it with a massive Sharpie pen. Looking back, I’m impressed that I walked into the College office aged 19 and persuaded the Bursar to let me do it; and that he let me. Yes, I told him, I could paint if I wanted to.
My drawings became even more conceptual in my third year. I made drawings with my own journeys, cycling out of Oxford into woods outside the city. I felt a tension, maybe oppression, living in the University city. I noticed on the OS map for Oxford that there were several woods colonised by the colleges: Brasenose Wood; Magdalen Wood. I cycled out to them. Returning, I brought back a literal piece of that ‘wood’ to the Ruskin, a twig which I drilled into the wall. I hung my journey from the twig, the journey between the gallery wall and the wood carefully spliced from the OS map by scalpel (Brasenose Wood). The green paper representation hung like a label from the “real” wood.
I repeated this exercise years later in Nottingham, travelling to the closest wood from my studio. But ‘Oldmoor Wood’, reached through a bypass under the blue M1 line, doesn’t quite have the same resonance. During that iteration, my car was broken into and my laptop and camera stolen. I wrote that to make a point about the poverty of Nottingham in contrast with Oxford; but as I wrote that, I realise it was misleading. There are plenty of deprived parts of Oxford, but we didn’t see them.
Studying art in Oxford was very peculiar. Head of the Ruskin, Richard Wentworth, always tried to make us alive to this, but I didn’t really understand why at the time. ↩︎