13 minute read
Low Season Travellers
Bryony Simcox and George Webster are filmmakers, storytellers, and changemakers. After starting their video production company, Broaden, whilst living and working in Australia, Bryony and George planned an ambitious journey to drive their newly acquired 1994 Toyota Hiace named Suzi from the UK to Southern Chile, via India, before Covid derailed their plans when they hit València, Spain. In this interview Editor Ryan Maley caught up with Bryony and George to discuss how Broaden started, their time living in a van in Spain during lockdown, the kindness of strangers, and how they have developed a passion for sustainable travel.
Ryan: Tell me about how Broaden started.
George: Broaden started when we lived in Australia. I was a self-taught filmmaker and Bryony was an Urban Designer and Placemaker. We were coming up to the point where we had to decide whether to stay in Australia or not, and we realised that we didn’t like the idea of just coming back and living a ‘normal life’. So we decided to live out an idea that I had had for years of driving from England to Chile.
Bryony: I was loving my career in Urban Design at the time, but in different ways we were both feeling the frustrations of working for a boss that wasn’t yourself. We were having creative aspirations alongside a realisation that we really wanted to travel. The company that I was working with had commissioned George to make a video about an urban design transport plan, and through that project we realised how much we liked video as a form of storytelling.
George: We decided that we would make a YouTube channel and create documentaries as we travelled. Before we left Australia, we filmed a test documentary for a placemaking project that Bryony was working on as a proof of concept, and we had a series called Place Portraits which was about capturing cities in Europe with an analogue camera. So the concept was around further developing the 2010s ‘vlogging’ movement, focusing more on cinematic storytelling.
We moved back to the UK and then started looking for a very specific campervan, a Toyota Hiace 1994, which we spent our savings on purchasing and building.
Bryony: For us, living in the van was about so many things; self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-determination, exploration, pushing ourselves to the limit, and celebrating old technology. The videography was the curse of the creative, we couldn’t experience something like that without feeling the urge to document it. So for us, using filmmaking as a way of telling the stories that we encountered along the way was the tool we used.
Ryan: So you set out on this mammoth trip and reached València in early 2020, what happened next?
George: We got to València in Spain where through Bryony’s contacts in placemaking we knew a guy who ran La Marina de València, which in itself was a really interesting city-planning intervention.
Bryony: And then in early March, when we had just made our first commercial contacts for Broaden and found our first client, an English-speaking Spanish tourism company who had given us an amazing brief, Covid hit. We went from enjoying a festival the night before where the city was packed with people, to being told that you have to be two metres away from each other.
George: We were stuck in a car park on the marina in our van, and we couldn’t leave. We would go to the shops and the police made us walk on opposite sides of the road. After a short time we managed to find alternative arrangements, and managed to move to a friend’s holiday home in Catalonia.
Bryony: That period was actually when a lot of the projects that we had been working on for Broaden got results. We finished editing the documentary about Portland, Australia, and we finished editing another of George’s documentaries called The Hundred Miler.
Looking back, being in lockdown was a really, really difficult time, and in Spain the conditions were especially tough. However, the Spanish government, to give them credit, realised the importance of culture, and this led us to getting a contract that really saved Broaden in 2020, which was filming music concerts in La Marina de València. The marina is an incredible example of placemaking that connects a working class town that used to be outside of València, with València itself. They had weekly concerts which they made for free for the public in the main square. During COVID they decided that they wanted to bring them back in whilst phasing the number of people who were allowed in, and livestream the concerts for anybody to watch. We won the commission to be the provider of the livestreams, and that job saved us.
We moved back to València from Catalonia and week in, week out, even though we were wearing masks and even though there were rules about standing a certain distance away from people, we were able to film live music, in a Spanish square, and get paid for it.
George: Essentially, that was the step where Broaden moved from being a travelling video storytelling project, to being a commercial outfit. We realised that we would have to cut short the dream of travelling to Chile, and so we took the livestreaming job. Through that connection with València and through friends of friends, we gathered a small group of commercial clients and really started Broaden as a commercial video company.
Bryony: There were so many dark times in 2020, and they weren’t just because of COVID. We were coming to terms with giving up on this dream of travelling and also realising that regardless, the van itself wasn’t suitable for what we wanted.
However, there were amazing times, for example being parked up at a reservoir in the middle of rural Spain and opening the van door in the morning to turquoise blue waters, or being parked on the top of the mountain next to a monastery and being able to just explore, or even sitting in the lashing rain in a campsite and grudgingly being plugged into electric because your solar panels aren’t generating enough to run your laptops. All of those really empowering nature-based experiences of the van, combined with getting the bug of self-employment, are moments that shone through.
Ryan: How did you end up coming back to the UK?
Bryony: In December 2020 we came back to the UK in the van, with the plan of selling it and going back to Spain. We had decided about a month or two before Christmas 2020 that we wanted to stay in Spain, but unfortunately that Christmas was when the Brexit rules were coming into force.
George: We employed a Spanish immigration lawyer to help us get a visa to permanently move to Spain, which took 18 months and £3,000, and we still got denied. However, within the 18 months that we were forced to be in the UK, we had actually started putting down roots. I started falling back in love with Manchester and the North, we started working here again.
Bryony: For those 18 months while we were one foot in and one foot out of the UK, we were feeling like there was someone else making our decisions for us. And I think, as George says, even before we had the decision made for us by being rejected, we’d come to terms with staying in the UK anyway.
Ryan: So what is Broaden now? What kind of projects are you interested in?
Bryony: Broaden is a creative company that makes films, but more broadly, that makes cinematic experiences. We’re really interested in using storytelling as a way of inspiring action, but we understand that anything on the journey to inspiring action can start with a thought or a conversation. Whilst we’ve got a team that’s growing, the company is a reflection of mine and George’s skills and passions.
We really do believe that the world needs to change. We’re very much driven by this purpose of people living more sustainably, people living more equitably, people investing in culture, and looking after each other.
George: The reason why I have settled on film as a main communicator of ideas is because I am, as I describe, cripplingly dyslexic. I’ve never read a book in my life, but I’ve watched millions of hours of documentaries, and that’s where my knowledge of the world comes from. Film has informed my view of the world from being a kid and watching Michael Palin documentaries on a Saturday afternoon with my dad. So when it comes down to the subject matters that we talk about and really feel need to change to create a better society, that’s where Broaden funnels it down to an audiovisual experience.
Bryony: In terms of the specific kinds of stories we would like to tell, we’re really interested in talking about the idea of DIY and repair, and why we believe that fixing and repairing things can be really empowering and really important to tackle consumer culture.
We’re also especially interested in communities and community hubs, especially in parts of Britain that feel like they’re dying, and how pubs can be the social glue in those places.
We’ve got a real interest in music and music education, and we’ve been lucky enough to work for a lot of music charities and music organisations who bring music education into schools. We’re both people who’ve benefited from the music education in our childhoods being a really key part of our creative expression.
More generally, we’re interested in the role of nature, and of protecting nature, whether that be carbonabsorbing peatlands in Trafford, or clean waterways and clean airways.
George: It’s the points where Broaden leaks over into our personal lives that we’re really interested in. When we’re deciding about projects we want to work on, we think that it surely should be the things that come very naturally to us.
Ryan: You’ve developed a passion for sustainable, overland travel. Tell me about some of your recent trips.
George: I think it started when we needed to go back to València to pick up lots of gear that we left when we came back to the UK. We flew to València with two friends, and we had looked at couriers to bring everything back, but Bryony thought we could do it overland as the coaches and trains don’t have a limit on how many bags you can take.
It was a hell of a struggle, but we packed all of our bags and took a train from València to Barcelona, and a 12-hour bus from Barcelona to Paris. We then went to a festival in Paris for three days, before coming back from Paris on the Eurostar to London, and then a train from London to Manchester.
We acknowledge that if we would have flown from València, financially it would have been cheaper, and timewise, it would have been around eight hours door to door. But I think it was because we had a specific task of having to courier our own gear, it forced us onto these systems. I know it’s no surprise to people, but Europe knows how to do trains well!
Bryony: I think for us it kills two birds with one stone. It’s a more pleasant experience and it’s a more sustainable experience.
George: After that, we got on with our lives and realised that we had done a lot of travelling, a lot of flying. We had flown to Málaga and back to do a shoot for a band. We went to Texas for South by Southwest. We got to a point where we decided that the next time that we wanted to go abroad, we would look at what it would take to do it overland.
Then the next big trip turned out to be meeting our friends from Australia for a big reunion in Europe. They chose to go to Malta, which is unfortunately an island off an island, and is quite difficult to get to. It was a big experiment for us!
Bryony: There was almost a comedy element to it all. Once we realised just how difficult to get to it was, it almost felt more relevant for that to be the one that we tried. It obviously takes so much more planning, so much more research, it does cost much more, it takes longer. But If you really do your research, there are often unusual combinations of legs and it was through that research that I discovered that there was a sleeper train from Milan to Sicily. And of course, the sleeper train is not only incredibly exciting if you’re British and you’ve never been on one, it’s also really efficient because it’s the overnight stopovers that really quickly add the cost to overlanding.
George: We are in a position where, knowing what we know about sustainability and the impact of travel, it feels that we have no choice but to do the utmost that we can do. It’s why we really steadfastly committed to doing Malta overland. But there’s some really cool elements too, like going to Paris for a day on the way. If you build it into your holiday, it’s no bad thing.
Bryony: There was so much about it that felt like rediscovering that childish joy of travel. I felt like on this journey, we were really engaged with the journey. One of the things about flying that I think is so abrasive is the way that you’re just thrown into new time zones, different humidities, different cultures. Whereas a train journey is a real cross-section of a place and you see it evolve. And you don’t just see the major city, you see the urban, the suburban, the rural, and the industrial. It feels like you’re exploring the place even if you don’t stop there.
We stopped briefly in Sicily on the way back, but we also got to see Mount Etna from the train, we saw the fields where they’re growing tomatoes from the train, and you’re sitting on a train with the local people and hearing how they’re talking, and you feel totally immersed in the place. So when you do arrive and your holiday ‘starts’, you’ve already had two or three days which if you allow yourself to be in the right headspace, you’ve already eased your way into.
