A YouTuber known as ‘The Village Idiot’ has reached an important milestone in his mission to visit all the 10,474 civil parishes in England.
Andy Smith, known as ‘The Village Idiot’ on YouTube, aims to become the first person to complete this unique geographical challenge.
The part-time Evri delivery driver says it will take him around 30 years to reach his goal. He has visited 1,300 parishes so far, which are the towns, villages and hamlets that make up the lowest tiers of local Government.
This weekend, Andy ticked off his last civil parish of the 172 in the East Riding.
‘The Village Idiot’ YouTuber reaches milestone in mission to visit all 10,474 civil parishes in England
GB News
GB News caught up with him on a trip to Boroughbridge. He said: “This is probably about the thirteen hundredth parish I’ve visited so far. There are 10,474 in this country. It’s going to take me about 30 years to get around them all.
“I’ve been doing it for about three and a half years and started during the second lockdown in January 2021 when Boris said we could go for a walk.
“When I say the word parish, I mean political entities, I don’t mean ecclesiastical. So we’re not talking churches here, we’re talking the lowest form of local Government.
“The idea is just basically to go around and check out all the history and chronicle it all and put it all on YouTube and see if people are interested in it.”
Andy usually spends three days a week travelling to different parishes and puts out a new parish video about a parish every day which is between 10 and 30 minutes, and he now has more than 10,500 subscribers to his YouTube tours.
Before setting off, he extensively researches each parish and makes sure he knows its boundaries. He then creates a video tour of each area pointing out local landmarks and amenities en route, all while wearing his Village Idiot-branded hi-vis jacket while occasionally being joined by his wife, Nicola.
He starts each of his videos with the same catchy intro: “Hello my name is Andy and I am The Village Idiot, a man with a car, a GoPro and an unhealthy amount of time on my hands.”
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
Andy Smith – ‘The Village Idiot’
GB News
The process, including the filming and editing, takes Andy around four hours for each video – and he says that it’s a pleasure to chronicle village life.
“You rely on each other in a village. Certainly from my experience, everybody seems to know everybody in a village,” he said.
“If you go to a big town or a big city, you might see someone walking down the street. You’ve got no idea who they are.
“You do that in a village and you think: ‘oh, it’s Bob from down the road, I wonder how he’s doing today’.
“It’s just a different way of life, and it’s cool to see how different people live in different parts of the country.”
Civil parishes are the smallest type of administrative area in England and are predominantly rural, with many cities wholly or partly unparished. Most parishes have long historical roots, but there has been a revival in recent years and new parishes are being created.
Northampton – with a population of 130,000 – became the country’s largest parish in 2020 due to local authority reorganisation, while a small few parishes are so rural or small they have zero inhabitants.
Andy Smith in Boroughbridge
GB News
For Andy, remembering the history of civil parishes is an important part of his quest.
He told GB News: “It’s the kind of thing that can get sort of forgotten in today’s modern world because, you know, we’re so reliant on the internet these days.
“All this general history seems to disappear and no one really cares much about it, and so in a way, with me doing this, it kind of preserves it.
“I’m not the be-all and end-all, because there are much better historians out there than me, I’m sure. But without people such as me, it will just get forgotten.”
Now living in Rotherham, Andy, who is originally from Lincolnshire, described the reasoning behind his YouTube name ‘The Village Idiot’.
He said: “You know, centuries, centuries ago, every place had their own sort of village fool, if you like, the person who was seen as the village idiot.
“I just saw that and thought ‘that sounds good, that might be a nice name’, and so I just ran with it and people have accepted it.
“I’m definitely not an idiot, but I do some daft things.”
Andy is now 40 years old and expects to be 68 by the time he completes his mammoth mission.
Click the links here to follow The Village Idiot on YouTube or Facebook
Source Agencies
