2025: What the Tide Left Behind

I didn’t set out to write a “year in review”. I don’t really believe in them. Years don’t end cleanly. They bleed into one another, like tide lines on wet sand. But 2025 deserves to be marked — if only so I don’t forget what I was thinking while I was in it.

This site has always been less about opinion and more about witnessing. Watching what washes up. Listening for what hums beneath the surface. Writing things down so they don’t vanish entirely. If there’s a thread running through everything I published last year, it’s that impulse: to slow down, pay attention, and leave a trace.

Names, lineage, and choosing a story

Early in the autumn I finally wrote something I’d been circling for years: Becoming Uri. On the surface, it’s a piece about names — Rory, Wilmer, Uri — and where they come from. But really it’s about agency.

Names aren’t just labels. They’re instructions. Inherited ones come with expectations baked in; chosen ones come with responsibility. Writing that piece forced me to confront a simple question: which story am I actually living, and which one did I just inherit by default?

Uri — “my light” — isn’t a reinvention. It’s a commitment. To clarity. To craft. To standing still long enough to see what matters and then acting deliberately. That idea — of choosing, rather than drifting — quietly shaped everything I will write this year.

The sea as teacher (again)

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ll know I keep returning to the coast. Not because it’s picturesque, but because it’s honest.

In Extreme Beachcombing I wrote about objects we throw away and then pretend never mattered — until they come back. A child’s shoe. A broken crate. A length of rope. Things don’t stop being meaningful just because they’re no longer useful. The sea has a way of reminding us of that.

That thread ran through several pieces this year: The Shape of What Washes Up, The Man Who Listened to Iron, Zen and the Art of Barnacle Maintenance. Different forms, same question: what’s worth tending, even when you know the tide will undo the work?

Barnacles don’t need clearing. The sea will reclaim the rock anyway. But until then, the act matters. Watching my son instinctively brush one away — without being told, without instruction — was one of the quietest, loudest moments of my year. The tide will take it. Of course it will. But until then, it matters.

The politics of belonging

2025 was also the year I stopped pretending that immigration policy is an abstract debate.

The Cost of Love, The Sound of September, and Speaking Out for Every Family weren’t written as commentary. They were written out of necessity. When you live inside the system, you don’t get to treat it as theory. You feel every rule change in your chest.

Watching migrating geese pass over the Wirral — crossing borders without paperwork — while families like mine count receipts and thresholds felt obscene. The contrast was too sharp to ignore. So I didn’t.

I wrote because silence starts to feel like consent. Because “moderation” often just means pushing cruelty further away from the people making the decisions. Because if you don’t put your own story into the record, someone else will flatten it for you.

Making the case for culture (locally, properly)

Not everything this year was inward-looking.

Speaking at Wallasey Town Hall — and later writing Speaking for Creativity at Wallasey Town Hall — was about something practical: how culture actually functions in regeneration when it’s treated seriously. Not as decoration. Not as a marketing afterthought. As infrastructure.

The New Brighton mural work, the petitions, the gable walls, the conversations with residents — all of it reinforced the same lesson: place is narrative. If you let other people write it for you, you inherit their assumptions. If you write it yourself, you create momentum.

That theme carried into the Mural Trail Update and into the broader work happening quietly around New Brighton. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s future-facing. Culture isn’t about looking back — it’s about giving people a reason to stay.

Stories as memory storage

Alongside the essays and arguments, I wrote fiction this year. Not as escapism, but as a different way of telling the truth.

The Underground Watch is a story about tunnels, war, memory, and a man who listens rather than speaks. It’s also about New Brighton — and the things that never quite stop moving, even when we pretend they’re finished.

Fiction lets you store things that essays can’t. Atmosphere. Silence. Unease. The sense that a place remembers you, whether you remember it or not. I suspect I’ll keep writing in that space for a while.

Cycling: trying to teach a system to think

I also need to put something on the record properly: I spent a serious chunk of 2025 on cycling advocacy.

I was vocal. I was active. I wrote a white paper about the future of cycling on the Wirral, and I offered what I know from more than a decade working with major sponsors of the world’s biggest cycling events. Not because I’m nostalgic for lycra, but because I understand how these things work when they’re done well: the narrative, the stakeholder alignment, the public buy-in, the sequencing, the proof points — the boring strategic plumbing that stops “active travel” becoming another brittle policy document that collapses the moment it meets a Facebook comment thread.

What I tried to push for wasn’t just “more cycle lanes”. It was better strategic thinking about how active travel is communicated, how consultation is handled, how decisions are evidenced, and how policies are formed without turning into a slow-motion car crash of mixed messages, political infighting, and half-hearted delivery.

And, bluntly, most of what I hit were brick walls: closed minds, pre-baked positions, and the kind of internal council dynamics that make even simple progress feel like it requires a minor miracle.

But I’m not done.

I’m still determined to make New Brighton the cycling hub of the Wirral — not as a slogan, but as a coherent, visible, lived reality. And there’s work in the pipeline that will demonstrate what clearer strategic thinking looks like in practice: a better approach to storytelling, better engagement, better momentum, and a version of cycling infrastructure and advocacy that feels like a community asset rather than a permanent argument.

Watch this space.

New Brighton: the year I stopped treating “regeneration” as a bedtime story

Straight after the cycling work, 2025 became the year New Brighton moved from being “where I live” to being the thing I felt compelled to document properly — not in the sentimental, seaside-postcard way, but in the uncomfortable, structural way. Because if you care about a place, you eventually have to stop talking about vibes and start talking about power: who decides, who benefits, what gets funded, what gets delayed, and which towns are politely left in the waiting room.

The first part of this story is the obvious one — and it’s the one people actually see with their own eyes.

New Brighton’s mural trail didn’t just brighten walls. It changed the town’s heartbeat. What Daniel Davies and Rockpoint Leisure have built along Victoria Road — the Victoria Quarter — is not a cosmetic project. It’s a working model of grassroots place-making: independent businesses clustered with intent, culture as the glue, murals as the invitation, story as the infrastructure. It pulled people back into the streets. It gave locals something to feel proud of again. And it did what years of official “visions” failed to do: it made New Brighton feel like a place that’s moving forward rather than being managed into decline.

That’s why I argued so strongly for protecting and expanding it — not as decoration, but as a cornerstone of Wirral’s development strategy. The murals aren’t just pretty; they’re functional. They create footfall, they generate conversation, they anchor identity, and they turn a town into a destination. You can measure it in café tables and weekend visitors, but you can also measure it in something more human: locals pointing at a wall and saying, that’s ours. That matters.

But the second part of the story is the one people don’t always see. The bit behind the murals.

Because while New Brighton has been quietly proving itself — culturally, economically, socially — the council’s regeneration machinery has often treated it like an afterthought. That’s not me throwing stones for sport; that’s me reading the record. I went through 40+ sets of committee minutes and supporting documents across 2020–2025, and what emerged wasn’t a smoking gun — it was something more depressing: a pattern of deprioritisation, delay, and a chronic lack of transparent decision-tracking. Not villainy. Not conspiracy. Just a system that makes it weirdly difficult for ordinary residents to understand what’s being done in our name — and even harder to see how promised visions translate into delivery.

New Brighton had a masterplan. It had consultation. It had strong public appetite. It had a living, breathing example of what works on the ground. And still… the energy kept drifting elsewhere. Birkenhead dominated agendas and airtime. New Brighton barely surfaced. And when it did, it often felt like narrative — not momentum.

That was the uncomfortable conclusion of Side-Lined by the Sea: New Brighton has kept moving without the council’s meaningful backing, not because of it.

But here’s the pivot — because I didn’t want to end that story by simply pointing at the problem and walking away.

The follow-up piece, From Critic to Contributor, was me flipping the script. Because being right isn’t enough. If you can see what’s broken, you also have to show what better looks like. So I laid out practical, place-rooted proposals — not fantasy projects, not vanity statues, not “big reveal” nonsense — but deliverable ideas anchored in how New Brighton actually functions: coastal tourism, culture, active travel, small business, events, and a seafront that should feel like a gateway rather than an afterthought.

And I need to be careful here — deliberately — because I’m not interested in cheap political point-scoring. The focus of my critique was structural, and much of it reflects historic priorities and previous approaches. With the current leadership, there’s an opportunity to do something different — to treat New Brighton as a serious piece of Wirral’s future, not an optional extra. If we’ve got support now, good. Let’s use it. Let’s turn it into delivery. Let’s turn it into a model.

Because the point isn’t to “win an argument”. The point is to win a future.

New Brighton has already shown what it can do when people build with intent. The next chapter is about whether the institutions around it are willing to match that ambition — with clarity, transparency, and investment that actually reaches the ground.

What 2025 taught me

If I had to reduce the year to a handful of convictions, they’d look something like this:

• Pay attention longer than is comfortable.

• Don’t outsource meaning.

• Systems reveal themselves when you’re forced to live inside them.

• Small acts of care compound.

• Place matters more than platform.

• And writing things down still counts as work.

Looking ahead

I don’t have a manifesto for 2026. But I do have intent.

More long-form writing. More fiction. More clarity. Less noise. Deeper local work. Fewer abstractions. And a continued refusal to pretend that the personal and the political are separable.

This blog remains what it’s always been: a record of thought in motion. A place to leave markers. A way of saying I was here, and this is what I noticed.

The tide will take some of it.

Until then, it matters.

RW