The North Road – Rob Cowen

The North Road by Rob Cowen, published in 2025, researched and written over 10 years, but in the making for much longer.

There are too many parallels with this website project for me to be dispassionate about Rob’s book.

Like the Great North Road this book is hard to pin down. It’s a travelogue and a romp through British history. It’s a philosophical reflection on the human condition. It’s an episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?”. But above all it’s a very personal exploration of the author himself.

Like me, Rob has discovered that travelling the North Road is a means to provide perspective on his own life and the world we live in. There are many personal connections and coincidences which span geography and time. We can excavate the layers of history and layers of life.

Rob comes at it from a different direction to me. He’s an artist, musician, poet and storyteller. I err towards facts, figures, things tangible. Rob tends towards experiences, emotions, things intangible. Different responses to our childhood stories – but we’re not so different underneath.

Every life is in many days, day after day,
We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts,
giants, old men, young men, wives, widows,
brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.
James Joyce

This is a recurrent theme of the book. Historic roads capture and personalise the comings and goings of us, our families, our ancestors, and the people before them who trod the same ground. Rob is fascinated by his great grandfather, Bill Cowen, who started out a miner in Yorkshire, established a string of businesses in Doncaster, before starting a new successful life in north London.

Rob is generous and startlingly open in sharing his own life experiences as he traipses doggedly along the side of the road, through neighbouring fields, over hedges and fences, wild camping in woods. He meets his younger self, he starts to understand his inheritance, and he starts to wonder about his future – and that of his wife and young children.

With the benefit of an extra 20 years I can predict that as Rob tips over to the ‘cemetery side of 50’ he will continue to find the road a useful lens – an inspiration and a comfort. Some of his views will mellow. Travellers along the road at different times are both rich and poor; both oppressors and oppressed; both good and bad; we each have very little significance in the greater order of things.

Occasionally, as I travelled with Rob, I felt I was drifting down side-roads and was losing focus on our final destination. But who am I to criticise. In compiling this website I have no grand structure or direction. I follow whims, stray questions and happenstance – and am rarely disappointed.

This is a well-researched, compelling and moving book. Above all else it has at last provided me with an answer to the question WHY?

Friends and family are inclined to ask Why I have created this website. Why I want to research inane historical characters or topics. Why I want to visit or photograph obscure places along its route.

My answer now will simply be to go read Rob Cowen’s book as he can express it so much better than me.

Rex Gibson – April 2025