Chapter 2 considered the history of Rotherham, the nature of the population and the current state of the local economy. Yet the demographic and statistical account separates the phenomena recorded from people's experience of them. In itself it tells us nothing of the impact of these phenomena upon what people think or feel. The understanding of place presented in demographic statistics overlooks the everyday spatiality of places, an imbuing of lived meaning originating in the comportment of those who use the space. Objectivist description cannot account for the matrix of meaningful practices through which phenomena actually become meaningful. In order to begin this recovery of an amorphous, ambiguous sense that pervades life here, something that rests beneath other particular experiences, giving a hue to them, I want to consider what made me awake to this concrete experience of the real.