‘The past is there, in the lines of our rivers, roads, buildings and streets.’

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...

Through glass: Victorian Great Yarmouth

Victorian Great Yarmouth   I'm always on the look out for old photographs, negatives, slides and plates. In particular, the old, forgotten and unseen. The vague visual detective work involved in trying to work out when the shutter fell as much as where, it is...

Vanishing Point: High Wood

At locations like High Wood, sometimes the only way to start these things is difficult, so here is a Piece of Mackintosh, not perhaps his best poem, but he can sum up the general situation in the area of High Wood better than I can. He knows what it was like because...

Hidden history: Traces – Boulevard Saint-Michel, Paris

We have family in Paris, or nearby at least on a trip last year we went to see them and spent various days bumming around in the middle bit staring at things and drinking small coffees and trying not to look too gauche or too much like tourists. One evening My...

Magdalen Street 6: All Saints Fybriggate

Magdalen Streets' hidden history: The lost churches Part 6, All Saints Fybriggate There were two All Saints in Norwich, the remaining one stands in the shadow of Westlegate House, the old Provident Mutual office block which towers over it like the tall kid who hit...

Lost in a Landscape: Little Hautbois

Another desertion. The photograph below was taken looking very roughly South at the present day situation of Little Hautbois; Little more than a row of houses just off the B1150, set in Pretty Farmland, it still just about clings on to its existence. As you follow the...

Through glass: Norwich 1960s – part 3, churches.

There aren't many of churches in the Phoenix collection, but what there are are fairly interesting. A selection and also some of the archaeological dig in near the Garth at Blackfriars and the Art College, Norwich. Please note: If you are going to take this content...

Dead cities: Langham Dome

Langham Dome A sort of anti-axis forces death star type thing. It looks a bit like one of those chocolate bombs or a steamed pudding, but about 18 feet high, made of reinforced concrete and painted black. Nestling on the edge of an abandoned airfield about 4 miles...

Through Glass: Dartmoor

Another set of odd negatives and plates I received a while ago via a very old friend Dave Guttridge. Dave is a photographer, musician and DJ by trade and also has an interest in the past, in particular shellac and the art of the gramophone. He found these while...

Lost in a landscape: Salthouse, touching the past

We visited the long dead, stretched our fingers out, touched fingertips through the flint and bracken. North Norfolk has some lovely landscapes, far removed from the outsider idea of some flatland devoid of features. The North County around Salthouse is a rolling and...

Last breath: Rosary Cemetery

Rosary Cemetery My inclination was to put this into the hidden history category, but then I remembered how often I end up sauntering around with people I've never met, but whose names I can see, in the light and shadows of trees and bushes and stone and thought it all...

Painted saints – Digital conservation and visualisation

A while back I wrote something about Swafield, which you can find here. I visited it for various reasons, one of which was the rood screen which is rather lovely. This isn't uncommon in Britain, it's especially true of East Anglia and Norfolk. It set me wondering what...

Through glass: North Norfolk, Herbert Thomas Cave

A second set of Philip's glass. These are 6 x 6 inch glass plates, mostly in rather nice condition, a few are de-laminating slightly and they're a bit dotty in places but basically all sound. These are believed to be by a photographer called Herbert Thomas Cave. The...

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, the greening, then yellowing, then bareness, with each revolution of the...

Lost in a landscape: Little Snoring

When you drive you travel along the edges of things, where modern life has built a wall along the edge of the land, the tall banks, berms and tree lines of the A roads and motorways where the litter and pieces of spent tyre lie in the dust. The piles of scrapings...

Lost in a Landscape: Little Ryburgh

A bit of a late addenda to a trip to Pudding Norton last year that ended up with a chase around the countryside near Fakenham looking at Deserted Medieval Villages, shrunken settlements and ruins. The whole area is haunted by the Flockmasters and full of such sites....

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...

Vanishing point: Berlin Sap

It looks like a field, because it is a field, one that slopes gently up to a low ridge, 60 metres at its highest point, best appreciated either from a mile or so back in the open areas behind the old line. It looks like nothing much, close up it is just a slope and...

Vanishing Point: Vladslo – Mother and son

Deutscher Soldatenfreidhof Vladslo. The Cemetery is about a mile and half north east of Vladslo which sounds like it should be on the steppe somewhere but isn't, it's in Western Flanders towards Diksmuide, Belgium, itself about 20 miles North of Ypres. It is somewhat...

Forgotten outposts: Brandiston type 22

There are hundreds of these scattered across Norfolk, it's not a modern phenomenon either. Defence starts at the gate to your house, there's ramparts and forts, dating from the late Neolithic to fairly recent lumps of Cold War concrete dotted about on awkward corners...

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,...

The Norwich School of Art – John Wonnacott

This painting is by  John Wonnacott. He taught us life drawing at the Norwich School of Art (Now NUA) in the first studio on the corner overlooking the river which is in the painting. I first went in 1982 as an external student, that's to say my then O level and A...

Hidden City: St Mary – The Chapel in the fields.

St Mary – The Chapel in the fields One of the most intriguing things about any landscape urban or rural isn’t so much what you can see as what you can’t, and how what is there covers up what was, or how it gives up clues. The Assembly House in Norwich covers a...

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...

New Prints

A new series of photographs of Anglia Square from 2009 when the car park was closed, to the most recent – the closure and demolition of 2025 and 2026, all open edition and at affordable prices.

Lost in a Landscape

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 there, in the lines our rivers, roads, streets and buildings. The narrative we exist as part of is as deep as it is long.

Vanishing Points

Essays on aspects of the landscapes of the Western Front

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.

Vanishing Points 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.

Persistence of memory

Mutter mit totem Sohn

Mutter mit totem Sohn

Mutter mit totem Sohn (Mother with her dead son) Käthe Kollwitz (1937) Neue Wache Memorial Unter den Linden Berlin I've been a massive fan of Käthe Kollwitz for years, initially aware of  her work and then the fierceness with which she burned as an artist and the way...

All the cars I’ve ever known

All the cars I’ve ever known

I wrote this in the early summer after reading a piece about ‘The Great British Car Journey’ – a heritage centre which has opened in Ambergate in Derbyshire. Then I stuck it to one side because it's not like my usual stuff, then the other days I thought I'd tidy it up...

Marking time

Marking time

It’s been a spectacularly bad fortnight. So here’s a story about some records and what they mean. Because music holds us together, it is partly how we form up into our ranks, each beat marking our time. 33 years ago, give or take, I first saw my wife in a pub, she...

What remains – ghosts 1

What remains – ghosts 1

I’ve built up a bow wave of subjectivity over the years about ghosts. I grew up in a lapsed-methodist household, my mum’s background was very low-church, the residual extent of which was she liked singing hymns in the kitchen at Sunday tea time. My dad sometimes, but...

Black Dog Tales

Black Dog Tales: Toby Gill

Black Dog Tales: Toby Gill

A fresh guest tale from Nicola Miller of The Millers Tale. A curious story woven by ghosts across the Shucklands of Blythburgh. Suffolk is home to many a curious tale, from the mysterious green children of Woolpit to a mansion which disappears and re-appears in the...

Black Dogs: The Wisht Hunt of Dartmoor

Black Dogs: The Wisht Hunt of Dartmoor

A guest post from Stephen on the nature of the Wild Hunts of Dartmoor. 'The spectre pack which hunts over Dartmoor is called the “wish hounds” and the black “master” who follows the chase is no doubt the same who has left his mark on Wistman’s Wood' – The Quarterly...

The black dog of Peterloo

The black dog of Peterloo

Guest post from Rosie Garland. A Manchester Encounter, or, The Black Dog of Peterloo From an unpublished and anonymous letter now in the collection of the Portico Library, Manchester. Typography dates it to the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Spelling and...

Georeferencing

The Norwich Bomb map – Digitised

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...

Norwich, a history in pubs

Norwich, a history in pubs

This is the work of Fraser White. In 2018 he created this using Google Maps to list all the pubs in Norwich possible, that includes closed ones as listed on the Norfolk Pubs Website and elsewhere. This is the kind of project I can get behind, so that's why it's here,...

Geomapping: Norfolk’s Deserted Medieval Villages

Geomapping: Norfolk’s Deserted Medieval Villages

A good few years ago Cameron Self and I were discussing DMVs or Deserted medieval Villages on Flickr, we'd both visited a few to take photos, thus began an obsession with them, not just the Medieval ones, actually all of them. There's an oddly romantic notion about...

Trench Ghosts part 5 – The Somme – High Wood and Courcelette

Trench Ghosts part 5 – The Somme – High Wood and Courcelette

A couple of ones that nearly got away, I forgot I'd done the High Wood one until a few minutes ago when someone asked so this makes sense. The Courcelette one is appropriate for today (15th September 1916/2016) High Wood © Nick Stone 2016 IWM/Google, High Wood...

Buy stuff

Lost in a landscape

Various prints from the East, Lost in Landscape and Coasting series.

New Forms – edge

Photos of Great Yarmouth between 2000 and 2021.

Colour

Landscapes, prints from various series and some one-offs by request.

Coasting

Photography from along the coast of East Anglia

Vanishing Points

Western Front prints from 2012 to 2018, from the 2018 exhibition.

Posters

A selection of posters based on various buildings, objects and projects.

Flatland

Small publishing co-operative, slowly growing our book list.

New Forms – City

Photographs of Norwich North taken from forever to 2023

New Prints

A new series of both old and new photographs of Anglia Square, from 2009 when the car park was closed, the most recent 2026.

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