Cities are not the same place in every month of the year, although they are almost always described as though they were. A city in August and the same city in October are two different propositions: different hours, different pace, different parts of it actually in use. Nicole Junkermann notices the difference most clearly in the first full week of autumn, when the change arrives all at once.
October is when a British city returns to its working self. The visitors have thinned, the residents have come back from wherever they went, and the streets fill and empty on a schedule again. It is also, for anyone paying attention, the month in which a city is most willing to show you how it genuinely works rather than how it prefers to be seen.
What the season changes
- The hours shift. Lunch becomes a shorter and brisker affair, and the evening now starts while there is still something left of the day.
- The light picks out different things. A low sun finds the upper storeys that nobody looks at in summer, and the architecture above the shopfronts becomes visible again.
- Indoor places take on the work that parks did in July. Libraries, halls, cafes and galleries become the places where people arrange to meet.
- Distances feel longer in the rain, so neighbourhoods turn back into neighbourhoods and people use the shops nearest to them.
- The calendar fills. Terms, seasons and programmes all begin within a fortnight of each other, and a city that felt optional in August is suddenly busy with obligation.
- Everybody walks faster, which is the surest sign of all that the season has turned.
None of this is a complaint about summer, which has considerable virtues of its own. It is simply that a city in its high season is putting on a performance, while a city in October is getting on with things. The second is much the more interesting of the two if what you want is to understand the place rather than enjoy it for a weekend.
The same holds for smaller towns, where the shift is sharper still. A coastal town or a market town in October belongs to its residents again, and the change in atmosphere is not subtle. There is a strong case for visiting almost anywhere out of season, and October is the most comfortable out of season month the British year provides.
Nicole Junkermann takes the view that seasons are one of the few genuinely free advantages a northern country has. They stop a place from settling into a single fixed version of itself, and they hand anybody who lives there four different cities for the price of one. October is simply the moment when the handover happens in public.
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