Question.
If I were to visit the area where you live, what would I be interested in?
This was posed to illustrate the kinds of questions which applicants to read Geography at Oxford might get asked. It’s a great question at any level, because it gets you thinking aout your home area, and how you might represent it to other people. Very often, I suspect, we overlook the attractions of our neighbourhood, becuase they are common, every day. We drive or walk past them every single day. Yet no place on earth is without some kind of interest; from the smallest village to the most anonymous suburb. The exotic and the mundane are interchangeable concepts; it’s a matter of perspective.Joe Moran, cultural historian at Liverpool John Moores specialises in the everyday; he credits his own interest in taking note of what normally goes unnoticed to the I-Spy books he read as a youngster. His books are admirable social histories and local geographies, focusing on the geography of the everyday; roads, motorway service stations, roundabouts and traffic lights, or celebrating the Queue and the Great English breakfast. Dr Moran writes a great blog, too.: http://joemoransblog.blogspot.com/
Perhaps much of geography is the study of the things we take for granted; the central business district of a town, farms, rivers and factories. It is from a myriad of little, small scale activities and patterns tah we can piece together the larger story, the regional pattern and the large scale global processes that inform the subject. After all, our motto is surely “think global, but act local”
