Sometimes we create without knowing how far our ideas will travel.
A weekend in Bath reminded me what can happen when one person simply dares to begin.
Last week, I travelled several hours to Bath because of a woman who was born more than 250 years ago.
When I put it like that, it sounds slightly ridiculous, but that woman was Jane Austen, and I was travelling to Bath for the Jane Austen Festival.
I went because I love fashion. I love the history of dress. I love storytelling and creativity, and there is something fascinating about seeing an entire period brought back to life through clothing, but I came home thinking about something much bigger than Regency dresses.
I came home thinking about what can happen when one person dares to create.
Jane Austen, Bath and a world that still lives
Most of us have probably heard of Jane Austen, even if we have never actually read one of her books.
For me, Pride and Prejudice takes me back to secondary school and studying literature. Then, of course, there are Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817, at just 41. She never married and her novels were published anonymously during her lifetime; Sense and Sensibility, for example, appeared simply as being written “By a Lady”. Her identity as the author of her novels was only publicly shared by her brother after her death.
Now why Bath?
Bath has a special place in her story. Austen lived there between 1801 and 1806, and the city appears prominently in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Even today, when you walk through Bath, with its Georgian architecture, crescents and sweeping streets, it is not difficult to understand why the city lends itself so beautifully to the world we associate with Austen and every September, that world comes alive again during the Jane Austen Festival.
This year, I decided I wanted to experience it for myself.
The experience started before I even reached Bath
I travelled from London Paddington with my suitcase and my Regency outfit safely packed away inside it. But when I arrived at the station, I realised that some people had clearly decided there was absolutely no reason to wait until Bath to get dressed!
There were bonnets, beautiful Regency gowns, tailcoats, families dressed together, young people, older people and people from all sorts of backgrounds.
It was wonderful.
There was something quite surreal about standing in a modern London railway station surrounded by people who looked as though they belonged to another century and we had not even reached Bath yet.
The train journey itself was beautiful, but when I eventually stepped outside Bath Spa station, that was when the experience really began. It honestly felt as though I had walked onto a film set.
There were people in Regency dress everywhere, and against the backdrop of Bath itself, it was breath-taking. I went to my hotel, changed into my own outfit and headed back out to join everyone else. And then came the promenade.
For one afternoon, we stepped into another time
I joined thousands of people dressed in Regency clothing for the Grand Regency Costumed Promenade through Bath.
And I loved it!
We walked through the city while people lined the streets watching, smiling and taking photographs. The roads were filled with beautiful dresses, bonnets, hats and coats.
I must admit, walking through those streets with people taking photographs made me feel a little bit like a star!
There was music, dancing, stalls and activities, people who had put an incredible amount of work into recreating historical clothing and there was just this wonderful feeling of collective enjoyment. I stayed an additional day so that I could explore Bath itself, and it really is a beautiful city.
Of course, contemporary programmes such as Bridgerton have brought a new kind of glamour and excitement to Regency-inspired fashion for many of us. I think they have introduced another generation to period drama, beautiful costumes and the fantasy of that world.
But something happened while I was standing among all those people in Bath. I found myself looking around and thinking:
All of this because one woman dared to write.
Because she dared
That was the thought that stayed with me.
Jane Austen sat down and wrote stories more than 200 years ago. She could not possibly have known what those stories would become.
She could not have imagined thousands of people travelling to Bath centuries later.
She could not have imagined people spending months making Regency dresses.
She could not have imagined the adaptations, films, television programmes, exhibitions, festivals, businesses, tours and communities that would continue to grow around her work.
And she certainly could not have imagined that one day a Nigerian-born Black fashion educator would get on a train from Kent with a Regency dress packed inside her suitcase because she wanted to be part the world she created.
Because she dared.
She dared to write, to create and to pursue, and what was created within the circumstances of her own life travelled far beyond that life.
That made me think about my own journey.
What have I dared to do?
There are things I look back on now and I am grateful that I dared to do them.
I have dared to follow ideas, to create things that did not exist before, to enter spaces where I was not always sure I belonged, to start things without knowing exactly where they would lead and like everyone else, there have also been ideas I have questioned.
Is this going to work?
Will anybody care?
Am I ready?
Should I wait a little longer?
Maybe this is why this experience spoke to me in a different way.
Many times when we are in the middle of creating something, we are often far too close to it to understand its potential.
We see the unfinished idea, the problems, the ten people who are paying attention today or the things that are not working yet.
What we cannot see is what that idea might become in 5 years, 20 years or, in Jane Austen's case, more than 200 years.
You may never know how far your creativity will travel
I think there is something both humbling and exciting about this.
You might create something today that changes somebody else's direction tomorrow.
You might start a project that eventually becomes a community.
You might write something that somebody discovers years from now.
You might open a door that another person walks through.
You might create something whose greatest impact you never personally witness.
And maybe this is the part of what creativity requires from us. We have to be willing to create before we know the outcome. We have to dare before there is evidence that daring will be worthwhile.
Jane Austen could not have known that centuries later we would still care about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. She could not have known that people would travel across countries and continents because they wanted to experience the world associated with her stories. She simply created and the rest came afterwards.
So, I am going to keep daring
That is what I brought home from Bath.
Not just photographs, the experience of wearing a beautiful Regency dress or the memories of walking through Bath with thousands of other people. I came home with a reminder to myself:
Keep daring, Keep creating, Keep starting things, Keep following those ideas that refuse to leave you alone, Keep putting your work into the world, even when you cannot yet see what it might become.
Maybe there is something you have been thinking about doing.
It might be a tiny idea or enormous.
You may have been waiting until you feel completely ready, wondering whether anybody will care or maybe waiting for somebody else to tell you that it is a good idea.
Trust is you may never get that certainty and sometimes you simply have to dare, because more than two hundred years ago, Jane Austen dared to write and last week, I travelled several hours to Bath alongside thousands of other people because she did.
Imagine what might exist one day because you dared too.
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