121 - Test City, Part 1 🧪
London’s taken it’s fair share of knocks over the years for being an average city. Turns out, our collective ordinariness has made us one of the best test-markets around. If it’ll work here, it’ll work anywhere.
Ironically, this normalcy means at any given moment, Londoners are enjoying things nobody else has experienced yet. Our mediocrity consistently births a lot of cool things.
We’ve got plans for a future list dedicated to some of these shiny new things, but we’re taking this week to set the scene with three articles from the archives on this "unique" position.
Norm Core 🙃
Nicholas D’ascanio’s 2017 piece, Norm Core mixes history with nostalgia and includes one of our favourite lines on the subject when writing “...if Londoners latch on to something, they must really like it. The city is content, after all, with not even having its own name.”
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Shad, the Extraordinary ✨
Jennifer Lee O’Brien’s 2018 feature on Shad spends most it’s time talking about the artist’s increasingly eclectic pursuits, but we’ve always loved it for the snippet on his hometown where he refers to London as the “most regular place in Canada” and credits his upbringing here with the peace of mind he finds in doing honest work.
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Why London, Ontario is the perfect test market 🧪
This 2015 article from the Globe & Mail pits a few brick and mortar businesses against the increasing benefits of “the internet” against the backdrop of the city’s benefits to entrepreneurs.
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Bonus: We can’t pass up this opportunity to link to London’s very own (now defunct) “Soda Pop Rock band,” Averages. 🎸
👉 Listen here
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