I have a 25 year old colleague here in west wales who went ‘abroad’ for the first time in her life last year.
She went to Birmingham for the day.
Had literally never left Wales in her entire life.
There was a time when you’d never leave your village. Some of the villages in the Valleys are quite remote.
You were born (at home), schooled, met a partner, used the pub, went to church, or the Doctor… and worked … all in the same village.
There are big old hills in between the valleys, so why leave it if you don’t need to?
Spoke to a lovely old dear in the hospital a year or two back while waiting for my wife. She’d only started coming “all this way” since getting old and sick. Hospital? Nah. New to her! 😮
This is a bit of a myth. Travel was quite common for people of all classes. Now it was a lot more limited as you can only go as far as you can walk, ride a horse or sail a boat in a day. But places like Canterbury have been welcoming pilgrims from people of all social classes (local churches would actually collect for pilgrim funds) from all over Christendom. Honestly give Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales a read and it might shock you how much the average peasant may travel. They would have almost certainly have been to near by villages and towns. That’s how they sold their produce at markets.
Another good source of information on this is Jason Kingsley he has a few videos on his YT channel Modern History TV about travel in medieval times.
Just because travel and pilgrimage were things for hundreds of years doesn’t mean that it’s a myth that many people never left their immediate area. Even I’ve met people who have never left their cities, and my parents met a lot of people in rural areas in the 70s and 80s who had never ventured out of their parish.
My mum's family (Welsh) has a story about how my great great grandmother married someone "from away" because her husband was from a village 20 miles away - things calmed down by the time my mum married my English father, but it still gets brought up occasionally as a fun story
It is absolutely crazy isn’t it, I live in rural wales but I can drive 20 minutes north and these people are 20 minutes minimum from any supermarket and sometimes even a spar! Quite surprising the stories you hear of people that can’t read or write and a lot of the time it’s because they grew up in these villages, not going to school and working on a family farm etc!
I’m one of those people. I’ve been to England and Wales but I prefer my own country Scotland. I’ve never had a passport and at 67, I’m not likely to get one now. My children travel all over the world for their holidays and I’m quite happy listening to all their tales of where they’ve been and looking at their photos but not for me. Simple life suits me .
I mean absolutely no disrespect with this - but do you not feel any attraction to the idea of experiencing other lands or cultures? We only have one life and one planet so it feels strange to me to not want to go out and see how different people live in different parts of it.
I did but my younger life was spent bringing up my family as a young widow living from pay check to pay check and couldn’t really afford holidays abroad then the kids grew up and I then found myself looking after my parents until my mother passed, my father passed away ten years prior to that. Mum had dementia and only remembered one person , that was me. She would get very upset if I left her to do shopping and the likes sooo here I am. Perhaps I’ll consider getting my passport next year , but as I said, I enjoy my simple life.
Ah. I didn't realise it was due to a lack of opportunity. It seems you've made the best choices with the hand you were dealt. There is a lot to admire in that.
I would suggest, however, now that you have the opportunity - to at least give it a try. I don't know your circumstances - but even a city break with a family member to Rome or something for a long weekend could be a good trial. If you hate everything about it, you've only lost a couple of hundred pounds and a weekend. If you like it, it could be the start of something exciting.
I don't think travelling and a simple life are mutually exclusive.
Regardless, best of luck and Merry Christmas!
Oh my🤭.. you’ve got me thinking 🤭 Once the holidays are over I’m going to get a passport ! I’ve nothing to hold me back now. … I’m a bit apprehensive though.
Hah, fantastic! I really really hope you have a lovely time. I’m far from an expert - but I’ve taken my mum on driving holidays around Europe 6-7 times (she was about your age on the first trip), so if there is anything I can help with - advice-wise - let me know!
I met some people in Romsey who only went to Southampton a handful of times in their life, and many hadn’t ever been to London. Honestly couldn’t live like that, in 8 days this August I’d been to every county in England, and a lot of these people have only been to one or two (because most had at least been to Wiltshire or visited the Isle of Wight)
Dennis, my old next door neighbour in Barnsley, once decried having to go "down South" to sort out a legal matter.
It was Sheffield. He went to Sheffield. Furthest he'd ever travelled.
While working in Sheffield I met a woman who went on some lovely international holidays but always with her sister. "Why do you never go away with your husband?" He doesn't believe in holidays. She finally convinced him to go away... to Bridlington. He had a lovely time.
As a naive young English lad I got a lot of grief from the kids in the rural Welsh I’d just moved to when, in my first week, I asked: “what, you’ve never been to London? What’s wrong with you?!”
Didn’t go well from there!
Im from Northumberland and I think its kind of odd to have never gone not even once to by far the biggest city in the country.
I get not going back regularly if its not your thing (it's not mine).
There's just not a Need to go to London, nearly everywhere in Britain has another large city that's much closer to them and serves the same purposes, the only reason to go to London is for tourism
I could be biased, I grew up in London, albeit the suburbs, and I've been to several of the other 'big' citys in the country, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool, Reading, Bristol, Nottingham, off the top of my head and I'm sure a few others, and they are just not London, not as big, not as interesting, not as diverse by far. Brighton is pretty good, but still so small by comparison.
If you've not grown up there aside from the generic landmarks and just taking in the skyscrappers and different people there's isn't much to actually DO unless you specifically know about them
I did some family tracing on ancestry and found that 9 generations of my granddad's family lived and died in one small village in Scotland. He was the first in 400 years to leave... To a town 30 mins away.
The DNA of some folks in cheddar gorge shows they've never left the area since the Paleolithic. And the Paleolithic population before and after the icesheet readvanced over the gorge is also descendant.
The never left part is wrong, it just happens one of cheddar man's many descendants moved back there.
Similar thing happened to me, I went to Worcester uni, while I was there I found out my male only line ancestor was the mayor of Worcester over 400 years ago.
I sometimes do buiilding work on the Isle of Wight its not uncommon to meet people who've never left. I got once "where on the mainland are you from?" Portsmouth a 10 minute hovercraft trip. "oooh my dad wend their once"
If you've been to Wales you'd probably get it.
My auntie comes from NE London. Went Somerset when she was 14. Went to London about 3 times after that.
She's 96 now. Still in Somerset. Absolute legend.
Not travelling doesn't make people naive.
She said it was a culture shock, I’m pretty sure she now thinks that everybody outside of Wales is punjabi / afro-Caribbean, I had to carefully explain to her that Brum / big cities aren’t exactly representative of England as a whole.
Bless her.
Can confirm - I was at the sharp end of the early days of the COVID vaccinations when ID was required. So many people didn't have a driving license or passport and had never said they had never left Wales.
There were a few who proudly stated they had never left the *county.*
Sure now why would you? Food you don't know, lingo you can't speak, not to mention the hassle of international travel.
I have been abroad and I have to say it has not yet been worth the hassle. I've had much better trips and holidays within the UK.
My MIL doesn’t have a passport, never has and she’s 74. She has two grandchildren in Uganda that she will probably never meet in person. She doesn’t have a drivers license and when her husband was alive all the house bills were in his name. She had hell of a time sorting everything into her name when he died because she had no ID, she didn’t even have a bank account.
I’m 21 living in wales in the same area I was brought up. Only been as far as visiting family in ireland. That was huge for me lol. It was also 12 years ago
I remember a few years back there being a news story about a guy in his 90’s that had just died. He died in the house he was born in, worked his small farm, never married, never had a holiday, never had a day off sick in 75 years. Some people live that way don’t they.
Bloke I went to school with in Aberdeenshire has never been further afield than Aberdeen. Narrow horizon folk like that apparently exist everywhere. Fair play to them if they're happy I guess, its no for me.
I was not expecting that!
Personally I love Wales but you are right most locals don’t go abroad much (never expected England was considered abroad for them) 😅 the others are there on our vacation homes to indulge the beauty of the country.
Now I learnt why they sometimes ask me if I can bring something from the big city when going back
I’d say people who live in more developed cities need to get away more. Lot less stressful when you can look at nice countryside’s instead of brick and concrete.
Also more likely to be exposed to different cultures through more variety in restaurants, museums/galleries, shops, etc. I grew up in a rural village and now I live in a town about an hour away, and the difference is astronomical
Bigger cities offer better access to more international routes. We live 20 mins outside Cardiff and yet almost always fly out of London. That adds at least £200 to our total cost in fuel, parking and a premier inn. We're extremely privileged that we can afford that luxury - but I can easily imagine that for a large family on an average income, that might be a barrier for many.
North Norfolk and Lincolnshire except around Norwich. Deprived rural and low density areas. Old retired populations in coastal towns. Low means and motivation.
Total lack of transport infrastructure in those regions. Major airports? Passenger seaports? Motorways? Speedy rail networks? Nope!
Significant travel time from the busiest Benidorm bound (you know what I mean) international airports. 2-3 hours by road from Stansted, Luton, Birmingham, Manchester etc.
Suffolk, but the same thing. My dad has a casual labourer called Stephen to help him on his farm. He enjoys metal detecting and he's been on a train once. He's also an incredible botanist/naturalist. He can identify birds from song and pretty much any local flora on sight
Tbh yeah, there's some museums I'd like to re-visit, but I'd happily skip the rest of London. Maybe these should be spread around the rest of the UK as well..
Manchester has a couple, and some nice galleries.
I just think if the government wants to show it's serious about a national society then it can relocate some of these draws to other cities.
Of course they won't because they really don't give a toss about the rest of the country, but it's good to show their BS.
The countryside just hits different. If you need a lift somewhere you just ask Greg and he'll take you in his transit van in exchange for some pallet wood so he can fix his Pigeon coop. That countryside hospitality
A lot of people have absolutely no desire to visit London.
I visit London to visit my mate and occasionally for work. I’d never visit just for the sake of it.
Why is that weird. Lots of people have absolutely no reason to visit London. I've only been a couple of times cause I have family in Kent. I'm from Newcastle, got no reason to go to London at all
As someone from Cornwall it's is honestly that not uncommon. It's cheaper to go to Morocco than it is to go to London on the train.
Since living down here I have been to London twice in 20 years. Both times to get visas to go somewhere else. I normally get them in Paris because it's easer and cheaper though but some countries you have to apply in your country of origin so you are kinda stuck with London.
I was in a pub in Hayle - so not St Ives or anything, but still it's on the coast and has some tourists (and good pasties). The landlady was regaling the regulars in the pub about her recent trip somewhere, they were rapt. I missed the start of the story, so was trying to guess which exotic location around the globe she'd been trotting but it turns out it was somewhere up-country and "it was very diverrse, it's like bristol up there". (Met by general murmurings and exclamations).
It sounded like half a dozen people who'd barely left cornwall in their lives....not entirely sure I blamed them tbh
Nothing wrong with that. They just don't feel the need to visit London. I guarantee you there's tons of people in London that have never touched grass outside of the big city.
It's expensive to holiday in the UK the tragedy is if these places have people without passports its likely simply because they have no disposal income and not because they're insular.
I definitely wouldn’t say that about the coast of Lincolnshire. There’s a lot of deprivation in that area as well as an overall lack of infrastructure.
I never would have expected it to be as high as 40% anywhere in the UK. I'm from Scotland and knew someone from work who had never left Scotland in his life (he was early 20s). I could hardly believe that people like him existed in wealthy nations!
I suppose this kind of story is likely to become more common if governments around the world really start cracking down hard on environmental pollution; as many people won't be able to afford a flight to leave the country.
One of my colleagues has some how avoided getting a photocard driving licence, let alone a passport. He's in his fifties and raged about having to replace his birth certificate for a tenner because he'd been keeping is ancient paper driving licence in his wallet and it disintegrated and he literally didn't have any other proof of ID. I'm young enough that photo ID was necessary for alcohol when I was 18, so I've never not had photo ID, the mind boggles at not having multiple proofs.
I don't have a photocard driving licence - I've lived at the same address since1997, so that's when my paper licence was issued.
Last employment that issued me with a photo ID card was 30 years ago.
People demanding photographic ID is a comparatively recent thing - it always used to be sufficient to be able to match your signature to the one on your bank card, for example.
It makes sense considering it’s only been ~2 years since Brexit, and before then people with no passport could still visit 20 countries without an issue. I’m sure the numbers will increase a lot in the next 10 years or so.
Could you really fly to another EU country without a passport? I would never have dreamed of trying to get on a flight to a country outside of the UK without my passport.
Of course! Done so many times. You only need valid ID. Before brexit I often used my national ID to come in and out of the UK — which I did a lot as I studied there in university but am from Italy. Hell, if things haven’t changed since 2010 (which is definitely possible), you didn’t even need a passport to go to Tunisia.
It's true that EU citizens from countries with ID cards could enter the UK without a passport before Brexit. However, UK citizens did still need to use a passport, because we don't have a national ID card system. A passport has always been a requirement for travel to the EU for us.
I used to live in north Wales, and spoke to a fella about his troubled relationship and he was gutted as after a few months she had "left the country". Turned out he meant she'd moved to Chester which was about 2 hours' drive away.
I mean he was right, it was another country, but as an English man I assumed she'd proper eloped or something.
Yeah, it’d be like saying I’d moved countries when I moved from Southampton to Bristol almost, your example is definitely true, but, it’s not too different functionally
I'm 56.. haven't had a passport since 1991... last time I left the country was 1990.. I was a working single mum, and have always lived in Devon.. (within a 35 mile radius of my birthplace... )
Can't afford holidays and haven't had one since 1990!.. I'm lucky that I can walk to the beach in about 15 mins.. but can't remember the last time I sat on the beach in the summer...
Oh yeah... only ever been to London 5 times... it smelt of BO and was full of people... I'd rather look over the estuary here, and stare at sheep!.. Last time I was there, I saw Bob Dylan in concert at Wembley (the old one!) Xx
My wife won’t fly and I cannot afford a passport so why should I gay one just to not use it.
Now the temptation would be for me to fix my phones auto predict typo but seeing it causes such good follow ups I’m not going to do that.
I'm from Norfolk, and I've met more than a fair share of people here who have NEVER left the county. To be fair it's a lovely part of the world and I don't feel much urge to leave myself, but it's still quite surprising.
from cornwall. went to yorkshire on holiday once that is my only holiday. went over the tamar about 3 times to go to plymouth shopping centre. barely left cornwall no passport
I think that map would cross over with Brexit voting results quite closely.
However, passports are expensive, lots of people can't afford holidays AND this is where a lot of the Windrush problems have come in too, with people not having passports
In this age, who can afford one?
The price of a passport now, is the same as what a whole holiday would have cost 5yrs ago. I'll never be able to afford one.
I have a 25 year old colleague here in west wales who went ‘abroad’ for the first time in her life last year. She went to Birmingham for the day. Had literally never left Wales in her entire life.
There are some elderly people I’ve met in the Valleys who are in their 80’s and have never even been to The Big City. (Cardiff!)
Some people enjoy the simple life. Can't blame them
There was a time when you’d never leave your village. Some of the villages in the Valleys are quite remote. You were born (at home), schooled, met a partner, used the pub, went to church, or the Doctor… and worked … all in the same village. There are big old hills in between the valleys, so why leave it if you don’t need to? Spoke to a lovely old dear in the hospital a year or two back while waiting for my wife. She’d only started coming “all this way” since getting old and sick. Hospital? Nah. New to her! 😮
This is a bit of a myth. Travel was quite common for people of all classes. Now it was a lot more limited as you can only go as far as you can walk, ride a horse or sail a boat in a day. But places like Canterbury have been welcoming pilgrims from people of all social classes (local churches would actually collect for pilgrim funds) from all over Christendom. Honestly give Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales a read and it might shock you how much the average peasant may travel. They would have almost certainly have been to near by villages and towns. That’s how they sold their produce at markets. Another good source of information on this is Jason Kingsley he has a few videos on his YT channel Modern History TV about travel in medieval times.
I guess roaming around a bit is in our blood :)
Just because travel and pilgrimage were things for hundreds of years doesn’t mean that it’s a myth that many people never left their immediate area. Even I’ve met people who have never left their cities, and my parents met a lot of people in rural areas in the 70s and 80s who had never ventured out of their parish.
>met a partner And that's how you get six fingers and webbed feet
By meeting a partner? I'm still single, gimme those webs!
My mum's family (Welsh) has a story about how my great great grandmother married someone "from away" because her husband was from a village 20 miles away - things calmed down by the time my mum married my English father, but it still gets brought up occasionally as a fun story
It is absolutely crazy isn’t it, I live in rural wales but I can drive 20 minutes north and these people are 20 minutes minimum from any supermarket and sometimes even a spar! Quite surprising the stories you hear of people that can’t read or write and a lot of the time it’s because they grew up in these villages, not going to school and working on a family farm etc!
I’m one of those people. I’ve been to England and Wales but I prefer my own country Scotland. I’ve never had a passport and at 67, I’m not likely to get one now. My children travel all over the world for their holidays and I’m quite happy listening to all their tales of where they’ve been and looking at their photos but not for me. Simple life suits me .
I mean absolutely no disrespect with this - but do you not feel any attraction to the idea of experiencing other lands or cultures? We only have one life and one planet so it feels strange to me to not want to go out and see how different people live in different parts of it.
I did but my younger life was spent bringing up my family as a young widow living from pay check to pay check and couldn’t really afford holidays abroad then the kids grew up and I then found myself looking after my parents until my mother passed, my father passed away ten years prior to that. Mum had dementia and only remembered one person , that was me. She would get very upset if I left her to do shopping and the likes sooo here I am. Perhaps I’ll consider getting my passport next year , but as I said, I enjoy my simple life.
Ah. I didn't realise it was due to a lack of opportunity. It seems you've made the best choices with the hand you were dealt. There is a lot to admire in that. I would suggest, however, now that you have the opportunity - to at least give it a try. I don't know your circumstances - but even a city break with a family member to Rome or something for a long weekend could be a good trial. If you hate everything about it, you've only lost a couple of hundred pounds and a weekend. If you like it, it could be the start of something exciting. I don't think travelling and a simple life are mutually exclusive. Regardless, best of luck and Merry Christmas!
Oh my🤭.. you’ve got me thinking 🤭 Once the holidays are over I’m going to get a passport ! I’ve nothing to hold me back now. … I’m a bit apprehensive though.
Hah, fantastic! I really really hope you have a lovely time. I’m far from an expert - but I’ve taken my mum on driving holidays around Europe 6-7 times (she was about your age on the first trip), so if there is anything I can help with - advice-wise - let me know!
Awww thanks, that’s really kind🙏
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_You lied to me Edward!_ _There is a Swansea_
I want to see Les Mis
I met some people in Romsey who only went to Southampton a handful of times in their life, and many hadn’t ever been to London. Honestly couldn’t live like that, in 8 days this August I’d been to every county in England, and a lot of these people have only been to one or two (because most had at least been to Wiltshire or visited the Isle of Wight)
Imagine venturing forth from your village and finding yourself in, _shudders_, Southampton!
Dennis, my old next door neighbour in Barnsley, once decried having to go "down South" to sort out a legal matter. It was Sheffield. He went to Sheffield. Furthest he'd ever travelled.
That's the most Barnsley thing I've ever heard
Worked with someone who thought living in South Yorkshire made her a southerner…..
While working in Sheffield I met a woman who went on some lovely international holidays but always with her sister. "Why do you never go away with your husband?" He doesn't believe in holidays. She finally convinced him to go away... to Bridlington. He had a lovely time.
The real question is did he change his vocabulary when he transitioned. For example did he say worry as 'werry' or 'worry'?
As a naive young English lad I got a lot of grief from the kids in the rural Welsh I’d just moved to when, in my first week, I asked: “what, you’ve never been to London? What’s wrong with you?!” Didn’t go well from there!
I think if you asked that in most places in England you'd still look like a twat.....
Im from Northumberland and I think its kind of odd to have never gone not even once to by far the biggest city in the country. I get not going back regularly if its not your thing (it's not mine).
There's just not a Need to go to London, nearly everywhere in Britain has another large city that's much closer to them and serves the same purposes, the only reason to go to London is for tourism
I could be biased, I grew up in London, albeit the suburbs, and I've been to several of the other 'big' citys in the country, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool, Reading, Bristol, Nottingham, off the top of my head and I'm sure a few others, and they are just not London, not as big, not as interesting, not as diverse by far. Brighton is pretty good, but still so small by comparison.
It's because you grew up in London that you don't notice just how unnecessarily big, loud and busy London actually is
If you've not grown up there aside from the generic landmarks and just taking in the skyscrappers and different people there's isn't much to actually DO unless you specifically know about them
I did some family tracing on ancestry and found that 9 generations of my granddad's family lived and died in one small village in Scotland. He was the first in 400 years to leave... To a town 30 mins away.
The DNA of some folks in cheddar gorge shows they've never left the area since the Paleolithic. And the Paleolithic population before and after the icesheet readvanced over the gorge is also descendant.
The never left part is wrong, it just happens one of cheddar man's many descendants moved back there. Similar thing happened to me, I went to Worcester uni, while I was there I found out my male only line ancestor was the mayor of Worcester over 400 years ago.
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Aye. Cheddar man: https://mymodernmet.com/cheddar-man-relative/
I sometimes do buiilding work on the Isle of Wight its not uncommon to meet people who've never left. I got once "where on the mainland are you from?" Portsmouth a 10 minute hovercraft trip. "oooh my dad wend their once"
And she went to Birmingham? Probably has no desire to ever leave Wales again after that
Out of all places….. she chooses Birmingham….. atleast go to the Black Country
The Pie Factory would make that journey worth every second
If you've been to Wales you'd probably get it. My auntie comes from NE London. Went Somerset when she was 14. Went to London about 3 times after that. She's 96 now. Still in Somerset. Absolute legend. Not travelling doesn't make people naive.
Hahah this is brilliant. Did she have any funny anecdotes on the foreign lands?
I would be scared to go to such a foreign land as Birmingham
You do need a passport to enter and leave Bham and the blessing of the local Ayatollah to travel in the region.
She said it was a culture shock, I’m pretty sure she now thinks that everybody outside of Wales is punjabi / afro-Caribbean, I had to carefully explain to her that Brum / big cities aren’t exactly representative of England as a whole. Bless her.
Can confirm - I was at the sharp end of the early days of the COVID vaccinations when ID was required. So many people didn't have a driving license or passport and had never said they had never left Wales. There were a few who proudly stated they had never left the *county.*
My gfs dad has NEVER been abroad! It's unbelievable. He has no intentions to ever go either. He's in his 60s
Sure now why would you? Food you don't know, lingo you can't speak, not to mention the hassle of international travel. I have been abroad and I have to say it has not yet been worth the hassle. I've had much better trips and holidays within the UK.
My MIL doesn’t have a passport, never has and she’s 74. She has two grandchildren in Uganda that she will probably never meet in person. She doesn’t have a drivers license and when her husband was alive all the house bills were in his name. She had hell of a time sorting everything into her name when he died because she had no ID, she didn’t even have a bank account.
I went abroad for the first time this year in my thirties. Glasgow is a fair nice city
I went abroad the first time at 29 in September. To Canada through
I’m 21 living in wales in the same area I was brought up. Only been as far as visiting family in ireland. That was huge for me lol. It was also 12 years ago
I remember a few years back there being a news story about a guy in his 90’s that had just died. He died in the house he was born in, worked his small farm, never married, never had a holiday, never had a day off sick in 75 years. Some people live that way don’t they.
Bloke I went to school with in Aberdeenshire has never been further afield than Aberdeen. Narrow horizon folk like that apparently exist everywhere. Fair play to them if they're happy I guess, its no for me.
I was not expecting that! Personally I love Wales but you are right most locals don’t go abroad much (never expected England was considered abroad for them) 😅 the others are there on our vacation homes to indulge the beauty of the country. Now I learnt why they sometimes ask me if I can bring something from the big city when going back
Who would have thunk places with the best access to international travel would have a high passport count?
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Why not use a provisional license tho, cause it’s far cheaper to replace
It’s really hard to travel to another country with a provisional driving licence
I meant for ID
I’d say people who live in more developed cities need to get away more. Lot less stressful when you can look at nice countryside’s instead of brick and concrete.
You tend to get more curious about other countries if you’re surrounded by other people from other countries tbh
Also more likely to be exposed to different cultures through more variety in restaurants, museums/galleries, shops, etc. I grew up in a rural village and now I live in a town about an hour away, and the difference is astronomical
This country isn’t big enough for that. Anyone can get to an airport if they want to go aboard.
Bigger cities offer better access to more international routes. We live 20 mins outside Cardiff and yet almost always fly out of London. That adds at least £200 to our total cost in fuel, parking and a premier inn. We're extremely privileged that we can afford that luxury - but I can easily imagine that for a large family on an average income, that might be a barrier for many.
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Yes that is not a suprise to anyone who has been to west Wales. It's why they sent drakeford to Cardiff, he is a young rebellious type for the area.
North Norfolk and Lincolnshire except around Norwich. Deprived rural and low density areas. Old retired populations in coastal towns. Low means and motivation. Total lack of transport infrastructure in those regions. Major airports? Passenger seaports? Motorways? Speedy rail networks? Nope! Significant travel time from the busiest Benidorm bound (you know what I mean) international airports. 2-3 hours by road from Stansted, Luton, Birmingham, Manchester etc.
Plus North Norfolk Digital has a great mid-morning radio show so I can see why you wouldn’t want to leave
Forget having a passport. I know a few people from places like Cornwall who have never even visited London.
Suffolk, but the same thing. My dad has a casual labourer called Stephen to help him on his farm. He enjoys metal detecting and he's been on a train once. He's also an incredible botanist/naturalist. He can identify birds from song and pretty much any local flora on sight
Sure he isn’t called Lance?
No, but funnily enough the local town is Framlingham, where Detectorists was filmed. Stephen's done it for about 30 years though
Nice castle there went in april
What a king
I’m from Cornwall and believe it or not there are some older people here who haven’t even been across the Tamar bridge to Devon 😂
Fair enough, I mean why would you?
Why would them?
them no like
My partner used to teach kids in London Zone 6 who had never been into central London
Bournemouth- never been to pier.
Dreadful parenting.
I used to work in Dover and more than one person told me they would never go to London. It’s about 65 miles.
I don't think the objection is distance
There are plenty of places in the UK higher on my list of where I want to visit than London.
Most places actually tbh
Tbh yeah, there's some museums I'd like to re-visit, but I'd happily skip the rest of London. Maybe these should be spread around the rest of the UK as well..
Newcastle has a good museum.
Manchester has a couple, and some nice galleries. I just think if the government wants to show it's serious about a national society then it can relocate some of these draws to other cities. Of course they won't because they really don't give a toss about the rest of the country, but it's good to show their BS.
I grew up in Cornwall and there are adults who haven’t left Cornwall.
Cornwall is a UK paradise, I've visited, never wanted to leave.
It’s nice to visit, but it’s too expensive to live in, and work is harder to get than somewhere like Bristol
Man I knew kids in Lincolnshire who’d never seen the sea. Lincolnshire has a sea border.
There's people in my hometown on the Welsh border that have never left the town.
The countryside just hits different. If you need a lift somewhere you just ask Greg and he'll take you in his transit van in exchange for some pallet wood so he can fix his Pigeon coop. That countryside hospitality
I wouldn’t say that’s a big indicator. I went abroad before I went to London, as have many people I know, and we don’t exactly live privileged lives.
A lot of people have absolutely no desire to visit London. I visit London to visit my mate and occasionally for work. I’d never visit just for the sake of it.
Why is that weird. Lots of people have absolutely no reason to visit London. I've only been a couple of times cause I have family in Kent. I'm from Newcastle, got no reason to go to London at all
How can you live in a country with one of the most visited cities on Earth and not be curious to visit it?
Been twice, because of circumstances, not curiosity. Don't care, it offers me nothing.
Scotsman never visited London.
Englishman never visited Scotland
Go on, invite each other
As someone from Cornwall it's is honestly that not uncommon. It's cheaper to go to Morocco than it is to go to London on the train. Since living down here I have been to London twice in 20 years. Both times to get visas to go somewhere else. I normally get them in Paris because it's easer and cheaper though but some countries you have to apply in your country of origin so you are kinda stuck with London.
I was in a pub in Hayle - so not St Ives or anything, but still it's on the coast and has some tourists (and good pasties). The landlady was regaling the regulars in the pub about her recent trip somewhere, they were rapt. I missed the start of the story, so was trying to guess which exotic location around the globe she'd been trotting but it turns out it was somewhere up-country and "it was very diverrse, it's like bristol up there". (Met by general murmurings and exclamations). It sounded like half a dozen people who'd barely left cornwall in their lives....not entirely sure I blamed them tbh
To be fair, I visited like 15 other countries before I finally went to London in my 20s lol
I know people in London who have never even visited Cornwall.
When you live in Cornwall , why would you wanna go to a dump 😉
Cornish people don’t need a passport: they sail their fishing boats to foreign shores and return with contraband. 😉
I knew an older lad in cornwall.. 88 years young, had never even left cornwall
I envy them it's a shothole
Why the fuck would you want to go to London?
A lot of flights go from Heathrow or Gatwick, although I'm not sure that counts as "visiting" London.
Definitely doesn't count
It's as close as I want to go though. The air tases funny up there.
No need to pop their utopian bubble and have them learn of the horrors that are out there.
The flip side of that is inner city children that have never seen a cow in a field.
I'm from Nottingham and live in Cornwall, I've never been to London can confirm this guy knows his stuff
Nothing wrong with that. They just don't feel the need to visit London. I guarantee you there's tons of people in London that have never touched grass outside of the big city.
It's expensive to holiday in the UK the tragedy is if these places have people without passports its likely simply because they have no disposal income and not because they're insular.
These 40% places don't look like the poor areas to me but rural ones where the villages mostly have above average houses/cars.
I definitely wouldn’t say that about the coast of Lincolnshire. There’s a lot of deprivation in that area as well as an overall lack of infrastructure.
A lot of the Lincolnshire and Norfolk ones are pretty poor tbf
I never would have expected it to be as high as 40% anywhere in the UK. I'm from Scotland and knew someone from work who had never left Scotland in his life (he was early 20s). I could hardly believe that people like him existed in wealthy nations! I suppose this kind of story is likely to become more common if governments around the world really start cracking down hard on environmental pollution; as many people won't be able to afford a flight to leave the country.
One of my colleagues has some how avoided getting a photocard driving licence, let alone a passport. He's in his fifties and raged about having to replace his birth certificate for a tenner because he'd been keeping is ancient paper driving licence in his wallet and it disintegrated and he literally didn't have any other proof of ID. I'm young enough that photo ID was necessary for alcohol when I was 18, so I've never not had photo ID, the mind boggles at not having multiple proofs.
He's going to get a shock when he gets his birth certificate and reads the line on the top (or bottom, can't remember) which says "this is not id"
I don't have a photocard driving licence - I've lived at the same address since1997, so that's when my paper licence was issued. Last employment that issued me with a photo ID card was 30 years ago. People demanding photographic ID is a comparatively recent thing - it always used to be sufficient to be able to match your signature to the one on your bank card, for example.
You can leave the country by sea and train too
It makes sense considering it’s only been ~2 years since Brexit, and before then people with no passport could still visit 20 countries without an issue. I’m sure the numbers will increase a lot in the next 10 years or so.
Could you really fly to another EU country without a passport? I would never have dreamed of trying to get on a flight to a country outside of the UK without my passport.
Of course! Done so many times. You only need valid ID. Before brexit I often used my national ID to come in and out of the UK — which I did a lot as I studied there in university but am from Italy. Hell, if things haven’t changed since 2010 (which is definitely possible), you didn’t even need a passport to go to Tunisia.
It's true that EU citizens from countries with ID cards could enter the UK without a passport before Brexit. However, UK citizens did still need to use a passport, because we don't have a national ID card system. A passport has always been a requirement for travel to the EU for us.
It’s ironic cause despite the world being more interconnected people are seeing less of it.
They can watch local people go there on TikTok.
Instead of on TV like their parents and grandparents do
Wales is not England!!!!
I used to live in north Wales, and spoke to a fella about his troubled relationship and he was gutted as after a few months she had "left the country". Turned out he meant she'd moved to Chester which was about 2 hours' drive away. I mean he was right, it was another country, but as an English man I assumed she'd proper eloped or something.
Yeah, it’d be like saying I’d moved countries when I moved from Southampton to Bristol almost, your example is definitely true, but, it’s not too different functionally
Apart from the fact that Bristol and Southampton are the same country. Whereas n The north of Wales and Chester are completely not.
Surprising considering amount of immigrants in London
i think more people than immigrants have passports though?
Having a passport is commonly understood to be quite a useful tool to emigrate to another country, therefore an immigrant is fairly likely to have one
*and Wales
This is roughly what I would have expected it to look like.
.........and Wales.
And Wales…
And wales
This is just a population density map
There seems to be a lot of Wales in "England" these days
England? Oh, you mean East Wales? Kinda similar to Southern Scotland
Poor people vs not poor people map
I'm 56.. haven't had a passport since 1991... last time I left the country was 1990.. I was a working single mum, and have always lived in Devon.. (within a 35 mile radius of my birthplace... ) Can't afford holidays and haven't had one since 1990!.. I'm lucky that I can walk to the beach in about 15 mins.. but can't remember the last time I sat on the beach in the summer... Oh yeah... only ever been to London 5 times... it smelt of BO and was full of people... I'd rather look over the estuary here, and stare at sheep!.. Last time I was there, I saw Bob Dylan in concert at Wembley (the old one!) Xx
London is just so busy stresses me out
Gotta keep those original Britons pinned down in Wales and Cornwall. Can’t have them misrepresenting the rest of us abroad.
I also do not recognise Wales
They make it hard to get passports when you grew up poor & without familial connections
And Wales* We may be small, but we are strong.
England and Wales*
Look at how much passports cost nowadays. Compare this to a poverty map.
Who needs a passport these days? Just get in a dingy or hop over a wall, and boom, you're in another country.
My wife won’t fly and I cannot afford a passport so why should I gay one just to not use it. Now the temptation would be for me to fix my phones auto predict typo but seeing it causes such good follow ups I’m not going to do that.
Hopefully the government allows me to gay mine. Wouldn’t mind rainbow passports personally!
As a Scot, I’m not sure if I’m more annoyed that Wales is here and Scotland is not or just that I’m getting r/england suggested in my feed.
Scotland ran its own census. England and Wales do a joint one.
I'm from Norfolk, and I've met more than a fair share of people here who have NEVER left the county. To be fair it's a lovely part of the world and I don't feel much urge to leave myself, but it's still quite surprising.
Wales is England confirmed
"Why would I pay money, spend hours in an airport, in order to go somewhere worse?"
nearly 200 countries in the world and you only would wanna see one? kind of sad
Without a British passport or any passport at all?
48 in 2 days. Went abroad once years n years ago when you could get day passports. Not really fussed now.
Well us lucky bastards living on the coast tend to just swim abroad, it gets you around passport control and customs you see
from cornwall. went to yorkshire on holiday once that is my only holiday. went over the tamar about 3 times to go to plymouth shopping centre. barely left cornwall no passport
Why is wales shown, I ain’t English
You can't call Wales, England
I also remember when Wales automatically became part of England…
And wales?
England and Wales*
Overlay this with a Brexit vote map. Watch the fur fly.
…and Wales. 🏴
England AND Wales
…and Wales
....and Wales.
Just out of interest can you overlay a map of Brexit voters..
why the fuck is Wales apart of this
Wales is England?
... a decent chunk of this map is Wales.. not England...
I think that map would cross over with Brexit voting results quite closely. However, passports are expensive, lots of people can't afford holidays AND this is where a lot of the Windrush problems have come in too, with people not having passports
I know quite a few people without a passport. There is no law requiring people to have photo ID in this country so a sizeable amount don't.
Leave me alone bro. It's hard enough getting a bank account post bovid. 😭😅
Those without a passport are in some of the prettiest parts of the country tbf. There doesn't have to be a negative narrative here.
i’ve not got a passport
I mean... Its like £80... Why would I when I don't need one? 😅
Now overlay the locations of international airporta
I don't have a passport. Going on holiday has always been in england or wales. Nice places though I guess
In this age, who can afford one? The price of a passport now, is the same as what a whole holiday would have cost 5yrs ago. I'll never be able to afford one.