Welcome
to Before We Leave with Bee Lilyjones and friends
Every place has stories worth knowing. This is where I do the work of finding them and where I inspire you to do the same.
This Substack is for you if you love reading about people, place and nature over the passage of time. You’re curious about the history of your house, your village, your town, before you arrived. You’re part of a community group, parish council or gardening club, or you run a small creative business wondering how to hold onto what it knows before the people who carry that knowledge are gone. Perhaps you tend a garden with a history and you want to make an archive of it while it’s in your care. You’re piecing together a family story and you’re not sure where to start…
Before We Leave began with a question: what would it mean to truly know a place before we left it?
Not just its history and landmarks, but the rhythms of daily life. The local knowledge people carry quietly for decades. The small, easily overlooked details that make somewhere feel like home.
I’m Debbie, but please call me Bee. I’m a non-fiction writer, arts curator, archivist, and local historian. My work moves between landscape, memory, and the lives that shape the places I find myself in. Most recently I founded a small business called Before We Leave (thirty years in the making, even if I only recognised it as such recently).
So, what started as a personal project — honouring a Cumbrian village my husband and I are preparing to leave — has grown into a small creative business and I’m loving it. I work with small businesses (gardeners, growers and even eco campsites), and community groups, parish councils, individuals and families. Together we gather and shape fragments of history and lived experience into something beautiful and lasting. That might mean building a living digital archive, writing the story of a house or a garden, or working towards an exhibition drawn from local stories. The work I do never ends up as a report filed away. Each client gets their own website, with their own web address: a living archive they can add to over time. I’m building a portfolio of this work over at beforeweleave.co.uk, if you’d like to see what it looks like in practice.
Why subscribe?
I post most Sundays on the connections between people, place and nature over the passage of time. I’d love you to share your own stories, or ask questions, in the comments.
A paid subscription gets you
A one-to-one conversation with me about your place and what you want to do with its story.
Regular check-ins as your project develops. Another pair of eyes from someone who understands the territory.
A yearly subscription means we can work together to build your living online archive, step by step — with preferential rates on website domain registration and hosting.
Because my background also spans arts curation, I can help shape archive material into an exhibition. Not every story belongs on a page.
A bit more about me
I’m also an ecological horticulturist and landscape designer. Together with my husband I’ve designed, planted, and restored nature-led gardens of all kinds for many years: tiny gardens, terraced gardens, walled gardens, woodland gardens. I’ve also designed an award-winning public garden, a set for a BBC television series, and a set for theatre. I rarely take on garden design commissions now, but if you run a nursery, a garden business, or tend a landscape with a history worth keeping, I understand that world from the inside. The knowledge that accumulates in a garden over decades, in the soil, in the records, in the people who shaped it… is what I work to preserve.
I’m writing a book, also called Before We Leave: a story of moving home. It’s a braided narrative about life in a small village, making an archive, belonging, and moving home. Sections appear here from time to time for paid subscribers.