Why I Built Near Here (Or: How I Kept Missing the Tractor Rides)

It's Thursday evening. My partner turns to me and says the five words that strike fear into every parent's heart: "What are we doing this weekend?"

And I have no idea.

Not because there's nothing on. I live in Surrey, and there's always something on. Somewhere within twenty minutes of my house, right now, there's a quiz night warming up, a craft fair setting out tables, or a village hall committee arguing about bunting. I know this. I can feel it in my bones. The problem is finding any of it before it's already happened.

The Thursday night search spiral

So I do what every parent does. I start Googling. "Things to do this weekend Surrey." And I get... Thorpe Park. Kew Gardens. A "top 10 family days out" article from 2019 that includes a soft play centre that closed during Covid.

Right. Helpful.

So I try the council website. And I find a PDF. A PDF. Of a what's on guide. From last autumn. With a broken link to something that might have been a scarecrow trail.

Then there's the local Facebook groups, where the event I'm looking for is buried somewhere between a heated debate about wheelie bin collection days and someone asking if anyone heard that noise last night.

By this point it's Friday. I've had seventeen tabs open for two days. I've found a pottery workshop that sold out in January, a "family fun day" that turns out to be in Guildford (forty minutes away, not the same thing), and a promising-looking farm event that... was last weekend.

The tractor situation

Here's the one that properly stung. Priory Farm is a lovely place just down the road, and they do seasonal events throughout the year. Pumpkin picking in October. Meet Santa in December. Easter egg hunts in spring. The kind of stuff that's basically designed for a two-year-old who thinks tractors are the single greatest achievement of human civilisation.

My son is obsessed with tractors. Properly, unshakeably obsessed. Every tractor is greeted like a returning hero. And Priory Farm does tractor rides.

Do you know how many of those tractor rides we've actually made it to? None. Not one. Every single time, by the time I've found the event on their website, or more likely heard about it from another parent at nursery, tickets are gone. Sold out. The tractor has left without us, and I'm left explaining to a devastated toddler that maybe we can look at a picture of a tractor instead.

They post the events on their site every time. It's all there. I just never think to check the website of one specific farm on the off-chance they've put something new up. And why would I? I've got about four hundred other venues I'd also need to check, and somehow only twenty-four hours in a day.

Then someone mentioned the fondue

Around the same time, a friend casually dropped into conversation that they'd been to this "amazing wine tasting evening in Reigate." Fondue, cheese, proper wines, the whole thing. "How did you find that?" I asked, trying not to sound too envious. "Oh, it's this little wine shop on Church Street. The Vineking. They do events all the time."

All the time. All the time. I've lived here for years and I had absolutely no idea this place existed, let alone that they were running fondue nights and pop-up restaurants with chefs who've trained at three-Michelin-star kitchens in Paris. Five-course tasting menus in a wine shop on Church Street, and I was sat at home on a Thursday watching telly because I didn't know it was happening.

That was the moment it clicked. It wasn't that there was nothing going on near me. It was that all of it was hidden, scattered across hundreds of individual websites that nobody has the time or the will to check.

So I built the thing

I won't bore you with the details, but the short version is: I taught a computer to do the Thursday night search spiral for me. It checks hundreds of local venue websites (pubs, village halls, community centres, wine shops on Church Street) and pulls all the events together into one place.

That's Near Here. It's the answer to "what's on this weekend?" that I wished existed when I was seventeen tabs deep on a Friday afternoon.

And the funny thing is, once I started building it, the Vineking was one of the very first venues it found. Fondue nights. Wine tastings. Pop-up restaurants. All sitting there on their website, waiting for someone to notice.

What's on near you?

I built Near Here because I was tired of missing the good stuff. The tractor rides and the fondue nights and the craft fairs and the quiz nights that were happening right under my nose while I was busy arguing with a council PDF.

If that sounds familiar, if you've ever found out about something amazing the day after it happened, or spent your Friday evening in a search spiral that ended with Thorpe Park, have a look around. We're checking hundreds of local websites so you don't have to.

And if you know of a venue we're not covering yet, tell us about it. We're all ears. Well, all code. But you know what I mean.

— Jon, founder of Near Here (and still trying to get those tractor ride tickets)