Since 2019, the No.11 Deli in Castle Donington has been my regular morning haunt for coffee – accompanied by whatever particular delicacy I’m unable to resist on any given day. I’m a creature of habit, and the food and friendly service made such an impression on my first visit that I’ve never really left.
Over the ensuing years, it’s come to feel like a community to me. The owner and staff always make an effort to get to know customers by name and a genuine warmth abounds. I often meet several of the other regulars there; our ‘Deli Delinquents’ message group coordinates our visits. Dave couldn’t be there this morning because he was fixing his cat-flap. I did, though, have an interesting chat with Ken about where he grew up in Nottingham. That gives you an insight into the lovely, comforting mundanity of our interactions.
When people ask me what it’s like to live in Castle Donington – so close to East Midlands Airport and the nearby racetrack – I invariably tell folks about my experience of the deli as an expression of Castle Donington’s tight-knit community.
Reflecting on this – still in the deli, sipping a flat white and inhaling a sausage and bacon bap 🙂 – I realised that it is very easy to project our own experience of belonging onto an entire place. ‘I know people here – we chat in the deli’ becomes ‘the whole village is a tight-knit community.’ The first is a statement of personal experience; the second extends that experience to the village as a whole. In that broad-brushed, hope-tinged shift, the people whose lives do not fit the description disappear from view – excluded from my perspective.
It is always worth bearing in mind – whether building a community or participating in one – that our sense of community may be real, but it is not necessarily shared.