The thing that changes first in a British autumn is not the temperature. It is the light. By the end of October the sun is low enough that it arrives sideways for most of the day, and everything it touches looks a little different from the way it looked in July. Stone goes warmer. Water goes harder. Ordinary brick, in the right ten minutes, looks briefly expensive.
Nicole Junkermann finds this the most reliable pleasure of the season and also the most widely shared. It costs nothing, it arrives on schedule, and it is spread across the whole country with unusual fairness. A few of the places where it shows best:
- Estuaries and wide river mouths, where a flat horizon and a low sun produce an hour of colour that no photograph has ever quite managed to keep.
- Upland country in the north, where the heather has gone over and the hills turn a deep brown that reads almost red by the middle of the afternoon.
- Ordinary residential streets planted with older trees, which do more for an autumn evening than most carefully designed landscapes ever manage.
- Any stretch of coast facing west, on an evening when the cloud breaks for a few minutes just before it gets dark.
What those four have in common is that none of them requires a plan. The season does the work. All that is asked of anybody is to be outdoors at roughly the right time, which in late October is a good deal earlier than most people expect.
That is the practical difficulty, and it is worth naming. Because the days are shortening quickly now, the best light falls in the middle of the working afternoon rather than at the end of it. It is inconvenient, and it is the main reason so much of it goes unseen. A walk taken at four is a completely different walk from the same walk taken at six, and in the last week of October the difference is the whole point.
There is also something characteristically British about the way the season behaves. It is beautiful without being dramatic about it. Nothing here turns scarlet the way it does in colder continental autumns. What happens instead is slower and more mixed: a long gradient of yellow and rust and dull gold that takes six weeks to arrive and is never quite the same twice. It rewards attention rather than travel.
A last observation. Autumn light flatters the unremarkable more than it flatters the famous. A celebrated view will look much as it does on a postcard. A row of wet roofs, a canal, a car park with a line of limes along one edge: those are the things that are transformed, and only for a few minutes, and only at this time of year. Nicole Junkermann suspects that is why the pleasure lasts. It cannot be stored, it cannot be bought, and it has to be caught on the day.
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