Sense of place

I'm Nick Manisse.

On today's special episode, produced in partnership with Range Rover and the second in a multi-part series, we're focusing on sense of place.

We meet Will Verity, Range Rover's brand design chief, on the banks of the Tagus to ask what impact a location can have on what we make and how we live.

All that coming up on Monocle On Design.

Music Hello and welcome to today's special episode produced in partnership with Range Rover.

On this program, you'll hear a conversation recorded at Monaco's Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon.

We meet Range Rover's Will Verity at our pop-up studio on the river overlooking the Portuguese capital to examine how sense of place and cultural DNA can combine to create everything from distinct neighbourhoods to rugged four-wheel drives.

Indeed, it was a unique blend of post-war British utility and a growing cultural shift towards more recreational lifestyles that gave birth to the original Range Rover in 1970.

you talk about home and you talk about your basement office, this first record that came out, when you found me, the pandemic sort of kind of ramping down as the record came out.

I mean, Sense of Place is a large theme I feel during that record.

I mean, what does Sense of Place mean for you through that process, but also just through your personhood and your music career? Yeah, that record,

it was definitely written kind of in isolation.

I'll have some songs and, you know, some of them are finished, some of them are halfway done, some of them are just sketches, but whatever I've got, I'll bring it to the band and we'll rehearse and we'll have practice.

Um, I think our tannin structure that we have here, for instance, is very different to what you get on the Simonsberg on the other side.

So we're trying to bring that to the fore, that we can get our sense of place here.

That we're not trying to be a Glenelly, for instance, or a Kanonkop.

We want to be our own, uh, uh, entity.

Um, the likes of shale and things like that.

But then we've got a lot of granites that have pushed up.

So we're in a fortunate position that we've got the two soil types that we work with, and it allows us to bounce those off in blends to get our unique sense of place.

You talked about tannins there, and when I was tasting with you, um, there's a, a, a freshness in style to, um, uh, the, the, the wines that you're producing, particularly with Cabernet Sauvignon.

Mm-hmm.

It can go up and down, but that's a great example to me of, like, that grape belongs in that place, and that's what you're talking about, sense of place, right?

Uh, w- uh, sense of place is the idea that you can make a wine that can only come from... with characteristics that could only come from that place.

Mm.

That when you taste it, you say, "My God, this is Gevrey-Chambertin," or, "This is Pommard," or, "This is-"

So there we go.

I actually think you, you picked out the best, and I'd say only really scenes that evoked a sense of place, as you said earlier on.

There was too much jumping around from London to Yorkshire, points in between, the South of France, and I never really got a feel of those places other than the fact that she just stuck a label on and said, you know, "Oh, now they're in Yorkshire.

Now they're in the South of France." It didn't feel like it, if that makes sense.

It's so good.

Okay, I wanna talk about sense of place, which is in fact much more straightforward, but I love the idea of this allowing us to take, um, a, just a somewhat closer, uh, glance at the really, really beautiful prose.

So this is on page 121.

Um, and you can imagine here that the person whose name is Adam in the book, um, you know, I'm, I'm, I don't know how much, you know, all of you readers out there are remembering of the book.

It doesn't really matter.

Um, it's, it's, I, I hope today what I'm giving you is a sense of like why it's so good, and again, part of that is this incredible narrative voice and the sense of place.

The plot is kind of, you know, I'll leave that to you.

Either you can go back and read the book or you can just kind of let this wash over you.

So I very soon, which is why I founded Sea Life Productions, very soon realized that I'd rather take a hit on my paycheck and keeps at least some of the rights to the video content where I could often those big production houses you don't get to do that but you know I started having the tools to really develop these so wherever I could I took even a hit on my paycheck and I retained footage rights so I could then use this footage to make educational programming And I felt that was a deep desire to just give back.

You know, the first time I actually gave a keynote for some of the stewards at their annual one day university conference at Southwaters University, it was in 2018 and it was called The Salish Sea, A Sense of Place.

And I really mean the sense of place part, because for me, it was done like 1500 hours of diving in the Puget Sound Salish Sea area.

For me, that's opened up a completely different world, you know, and when I look at the interface between water and the land, I can kind of deduct what's underneath the surface right there when I look at these places because I've been there.

And it gives you a completely different idea of where you live when you can translate what's for a lot of us is just the surface.

And we generally sell out.

So, you know, if you're interested, go on our website, saltwater stewards, and get a ticket early because they do sell.

And so I did my first keynote there, and I called it The Salish Sea, A Sense of Place.