Things to look at and read
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Landscapes in black & white
Limited and open edition prints of local landscapes shot between 2007 and 2018.
Landscapes in colour
Open edition prints of local landscapes in colour shot between 2005 and 2018.
Vanishing points
The Great War series, limited and open edition prints shot between 2014 and 2018.
Poster prints
Nice big printed graphical things – new ones appearing gradually.
The Flatland
Books and pamphlets from the Flatland Press, a new venture set up in 2020.
Blitz ghosts, bomb maps and more…
Ten years ago I did a thing, the echo is still rattling about in my head, occasionally it slides noisily back into my consciousness so I add to it, it’s mostly here.
The Norwich Bomb map – Digitised
The Norwich bomb map was originally created by Norwich Air Raid Precautions Department to record all known bombs* dropped on Norwich between 1940 and 1945, including the extensive Baedeker Raids of 1942, giving the location, date of the raid and the type of ordinance...
Baedeker Blitz Norwich – deaths
I've intended to publish this every year since about 2011, refining it slowly. A year or so ago I tweeted all of these names, these people, because every year I always try to do something or other perhaps in an oddly selfish way, in some ways to remember them all just...
Blitz in Colour: The British Gas Light Company, Dereham Road
Post-April 27th 1942, Blitz in colour, this was the scene at the corner of Heigham Road and Dereham Road in Norwich during some kind of clear up work, probably to do with the gas supply. The whole crossroads here was badly damaged, the pub to the rear of the picture...
Blitz in Colour: Dereham Road Baptist Church 1942
Opened in 1904. Closed temporarily in 1942 during the Baedeker Raids. Sources point at this being a result of the first raid on the Monday night; the 27th of April; this would fit the pattern of most of the bombing being of the north and north-western sectors of the...
Blitz in Colour: Curls Store 30th April 1942
Outside Curls store, Rampant Horse Street corner with Brigg Street, 30th April 1942. They're standing in the wreckage caused by the incendiary bombs that fell on Norwich on the second night of the Baedeker Raids on Norwich. So this is the 30th of April 1942. The photo...
Blitz Ghosts: Church of St Julian Norwich
One of the best known Blitz victims in Norwich, because of it's famous St Julian thing. Hit head on by a 250kg, it was all but obliterated as you can see. Beautifully rebuilt, and a fabulous little church, even if you don't do the whole religion thing it's a very calm...
Lost in a Landscape
and other places…
A series of essays
An unstructured collection of written pieces which are basically a long form series of intermittent work – mostly observational, written to accompany photographs shot over the last ten to fifteen years across Norfolk and East Anglia. These essays look both at what is seen as well as what isn’t; acknowledging the depth of the landscapes we briefly inhabit, and the lives lived that are disguised by geographical, environmental and human change.
The history of us is in our soil, mixed with the crag and flint, hidden in our place-names, and lines our fields and boundaries. The past is their in the lines our rivers, roads, streets and buildings. The narrative we exist as part of is as deep as it is long.
Walking the past: St Georges Street – Part Two
Once you get past the nexus of Vikings, Lollards, and antifa missionaries. You are faced with a recent piece of change – a set of traffic lights which supplanted a pedestrian subway much beloved by lots of local photographers, graffiti artists, pooling rainwater,...
Walking the past: St Georges Street – Part One
I’ve recently been trying to get back into the habit of walking again, going out at all if I’m honest. I started lockdown with no work and plenty of time and walked frequently, over the last 18 months the polarity has reversed, so I’ve had less time, and too many...
Graffiti Jam, Sovereign House, Anglia Square 2009
I'm a bit of a graffiti watcher, I like the stuff basically, it's that human mark-making thing. The 'remember me' trope. I've written about it a little bit before, arborglyphs at Blickling springs to mind. I've also watched a lot of developments with...
Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf
White light and angels. It rained, my god how it rained. A bank holiday hex hanging over Easter. And typically the patterns of various occupations in one household left me on my own staring at a refracted sodden world as the cars trundling along Aylsham Road under a...
Lost in a Landscape: Scottow
Memory has a strange tonal range, there are sparks of colour in between the washes of grey and flat spots of black or white. I have a very distinct memory of first learning to ride a bike. Oddly for some reason that escapes me it wasn’t at the hands of a parent...
Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless
There is this thing were you travel through a landscape, passing things, that have become lost, part of the blur of the countryside, the unnoticed facets of a landscape which sit just back, away from our arterial routes cut as they are by human traffic. It’ is also...
Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood
There is a darkness in woodland, hiding in the shade of the green canopy, something that retracts in the sunlight in the corner of your vision, beyond the growing and shrinking of the shadows with each revolution of the earth on its tipping axis. Beyond the sterility...
Lost in a Landscape: Trunch
There’s a lot in a name, Trunch has one that doesn't fit in in Norfolk, or in fact in England. Locally it sits uneasily with the profusion of ~hams and ~tons, and ~bys and ~thorps. East Anglia’s toponymy is that of the invaded, repeatedly settled. People who move into...
Lost in a Landscape: Rich pickings – Swafield
Swafield and Bradfield ‘Fruit picking’ and ‘Pick your own’, are something commonly seen on hand painted signs still wedged in hedges and gateways across rural East Anglia and the Fens, it was and is part of a year long routine in Norfolk, especially with summer...
Lost in a landscape: Little Witchingham
There's a sea of barley, the horizon a shadowed thin night cloud line of trees. In the late afternoon heat this far from the coast there's no wind, no air sucked in by the heated land to move the thorned tops. Everything is calm. The summer hasn't advanced enough to...
Lost in a Landscape – Lyng Easthaugh
The lands to the west of Norwich have only a passing familiarity for me. I grew up in north-east Norfolk where I recognise the landscape facets and how they fit together pretty well, the marl pits and churches and the little winding roads that dip in and to of the...
Lost in a landscape: Edingthorpe – Rising toward the surface
The cloud has almost boiled back, the sun chasing a lowering and disintegrating weak ridge of low pressure, there's a space for early summer between it and the next low dragging in from the south west. Temperatures are rising into those of a late summer day, yet it's...
Vanishing Points
The Great War series
Vanishing Points is a long-form photographic series with accompanying interpretation consisting of stories relating to the landscapes of the Western Front, memorials and some of the figures that peopled them.
A selection of 36 final images was made from over 120 photographs which formed the core of the 2018 exhibition and collection at St Peter Hungate in Norwich, The exhibition was timed to coincide with the centenary of the Armistice and ran for two weeks.
The response was truly staggering.
The original articles can be found on the links below and images can be purchased from the collection in the shop.
Articles
Vanishing Point: Dartmoor – father and son
There's a focus, out there. You'll see it in most cemeteries on the old front. The famous dead, the men, and boys who achieve some infamy by dint of their bravery, age or circumstances. Sometimes it's a footballer who scored big in 1912 before signing away four years,...
Vanishing Point: Bernafay Wood
After Carnoy the cloud started to drop, a shield of it obliterated the sun. Within twenty minutes the light had almost completely failed, the air filled with prickles of moisture. It took a good hour to lift as the edge of a small front slid in from the South West. It...
Vanishing point: Courcelette
I've been fortunate at times out on the front, walking the levelled trenches, across the flattened shell holes and in the regrown woods. You meet people, some you know via the curious enmeshed world of social media, shared interests in a shared space eventually made...
Vanishing point: Guillemont, Trones and Jünger’s Lane.
It suddenly struck me yesterday, what I'm trying to finish the unfinishable. The Great War may have ended in 1918, but it didn't, and so it goes, new layers of images, understanding and history being laid down with every word typed and shutter click. I'd set various...
Vanishing Point: Carnoy to Montauban
I'm not far from here. Sitting in a hotel room on a laptop, near a roundabout and Le McDonalds, watching a dubbed film which was bad enough in English in the first place. So I thought I'd start doing something apart from lazy hotel drinking. Carnoy is just to the...
Lost boys: Sid Northrop
I recently rediscovered this. It was something I'd put on Flickr. It is the tale of another family member and his last few days and hours in the Great War. We visited the panel he is remembered on at Tyne Cot a couple of years ago. He was my grandmother Jesse Parr's...
Vanishing Points series prints
If you would like to buy a Limited or Open Edition Print from the Vanishing Points series some are still available in the shop
Like what I do?
If you like what I do you can support the site running costs here by sending me a few quid using Kofi. Always much appreciated.
Through glass
Found slides, glass plates, photographs and archive material.
American holidays 1963 to 1970
More found slides. I can't really tell whether these are people on holiday in America from elsewhere, but I sort of have a feeling that these people are American holidaying in America. The dates range from 1963 to 1970 and comprise trips to New York, Cincinnati,...
SS Oriana from the 1960s
I've recently been given a huge number of slides, a real mixture of stuff which I'm now slowly working my way through. This pile came in a couple of huge bags from two friends, firstly Charlie, who gave me so many photos of stately homes from the 1980s I’m...
Cambridgeshire 1963/64
One thing lock down has provided is time to review piles of old stuff I've accumulated over the last few years. Namely boxes of slides negatives and photos I pick up for a few quid here and there in junk shops, or get given occasionally. All rescues anyway, this one...
The Goodrum slides
Barrack street, Norwich, is a non-place. There's not much there to see, it's a place to pass through, a ring road asphalt necklace choking the medieval. Apart from some tasty post war council flats and a building I once was trained to explain Richard...
Pleasure Beach – Great Yarmouth 2009
I've had a few minor league unpleasant 'Oh FFS' things happen lately, one of the most recent was a hard drive suddenly making a horrible keening noise and then refusing to mount. Two days of trying different software to get it working again and bingo I had a drive...
Through Glass: Norwich Skyline 1890s
I love a bit of glass, particularly when it shows the city spread out like this. Believed to have been taken in 1890 this is a magic lantern slide. It appear to have been taken from St James Hill. You'd probably struggle to replicate the shot now due to the amount of...