Hyperlocal

It’s five years today since the date of the Rhuthun/Ruthin blog’s first post!

Five years ago, we had no Tesco, no Glasdir and no northern relief road. And we suffered an uninspiring craft centre. Mind you, there’s still no new primary school or industrial units opposite Glasdir, as expected. Five years ago, the Picture House was a dance school, B & M was Kwiksave, Slater’s sold cars, we recycled not via the doorstep but at Lôn Parcwr, there was a little known family history centre tucked behind Mwrog Street, and Nantclwyd y Dre hadn’t opened its doors. And there have been countless changes of businesses in the town centre, including good times and bad.

We started with a simple remit to report the effect Tesco has had on a small town of what was then 5,300. Over the years, that’s widened considerably. According to the man behind the BBC North East Wales website, we’ve apparently become ‘hyperlocal’. ‘Hyperlocal’ is different to ‘local’, the latter seen as covering a wider area.

‘Hyperlocal’ isn’t a term I’d come across before. Anything that’s hyperlocal has a scale at a community level. Anything hyperlocal (including a blog) is created by locals, for locals. Even so, the term seems a contradiction: my understanding of the modifier ‘hyper-’ is that it means ‘over, beyond’; as in hyperactive, hyperspace, thus beyond local. A better term might be hypolocal. ‘Hypo-’ means ‘below, beneath’, so hypolocal might mean below the level of what is generally considered local or sub-local.

Nick Borne of the BBC feels that we live in an era where rightly or wrongly we see the dominance of transnational organisations and the likes of Tesco, manufacturing & distributing is on a global scale. In the face of this, he suggests ‘local’ is reinventing itself from the grass roots up. Rhuthun is the epitome of local, with a town centre full of local enterprises. Yet, little of what they sell is hyperlocal. Hyperlocal examples are few but in the Rhuthun area they might be Rhescoed farm shop, selling local produce; the Raven Inn at Llanarmon yn Iâl, owned by the community; the Patchwork Food Company, though here is a local food processor/manufacturer with outlets in the USA; and the town’s Hide Away, making its own leather accessories. Taurus Trading sold locally manufactured gifts but is no more.

And the Rhuthun/Ruthin Blog is an example, apparently. Crumbs, hyperlocal, eh? What about that. And we just thought pretentiously we were citizen journalists. A self-congratulatory happy birthday to us nonetheless!