LOST IN A LANDSCAPE

Lost in a landscape: Caistor St Edmund – A buried town

Five miles to the South East of the modern nucleus of Norwich sits Caistor St Edmunds, on a rise in the land between the confluence of the River Tas and the River Yare near where the Wensum joins the "I'm the biggest River" bunfight and loses it pointlessly, it's...

Lost in a Landscape: Bawsey – the Church on the hill

It seemed rude not to, I've been driving past Bawsey for far too long, so on a trip to Derbyshire to drink and take in a band (Phantogram) with my Nephew Rich, I made an attempt to stop. In fact I had two attempts at it, Sundays' mission was stopped by the heavens...

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: Weeting pathways

We've been here before. Scrambling about in the past and the past is somehow where this piece of Breckland always feels like it is frozen. We took our children to run around the ridges around the holes in the landscape and down into the belly of the Brecks deep in...

Lost in a Landscape: Pudding Norton

There's a lot to be intrigued about in towns like Fakenham. Not unlike North Walsham, it sits on a small winding road that makes it's a much less direct but more interesting journey than somewhere like Attleborough or Wymondham. The drive is less straightforward but...

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...

Lost in a Landscape: Arminghall henge

Imagine for a moment flying over a landscape. There's a city below you receding to one side, fields coming into view on the other, lots of features to look at as well as flying a plane. You look down and spot a mark in a field, and this is the sort of thing you are...

Lost in a landscape Hardingham – four crosses

There's a sort of axis of travel in everyone's existence, roads that we travel often at various times that become embedded into us a part of our journey through life. Well worn paths that aren't exactly desire lines, they are the things that link us together, part of...

Bixley – the lost village

Bixley barely exists as a place, not far from the A146, it is now largely a track to a church which until relatively recently served the rural surroundings and a diminishing population. The last human connections are the graveyard and the landscape itself which still...

Lost in a Landscape: Shipden

We are spoilt for lost villages in Norfolk and due to the nature of the coast have a huge number that weren't down to the usual suspects, so not things like plague, pestilence or bad land for farming or landlords enclosing land or commons; moving sheep in to replace...

Lost in a Landscape: Oxnead

A pasture for the oxen, that's what it means so say various sources. Others indicate that the Ox- may come from the word Ouse (Udso), which is an older form from our ginger forefathers possibly of Celt or proto-Celtic origin probably meaning River. It maybe a rare...

Lost in a landscape: Booton

There's things you round a corner and don't really expect to see in the corner of a field, ostriches for instance, rare but not unlikely, elephants, I've seen photos of elephants in Norfolk fields. Booton has a really staggeringly odd, stamp-on-your-brakes sort of...

Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

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 lead grey sky. I went...

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

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

‘Fruit picking’ and ‘Pick your own’, still seen on cardboard hand painted signs still wedged in hedges and gateways, were and are a summer long routine in Norfolk. The memory flickers up from somewhere as I drive, I'm here and not, between sunlight and...

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

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....

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Vanishing Points

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 world of social media, shared interests in a shared space eventually made flesh out...

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: The Bull Ring, Etaples

Etaples was one of the main base camps along the coast of Northern France, being a port, a lot of men, thousands of them would have disembarked here. Many more would have embarked. It was known as "The Bullring", as were most of the base camps, but this one was the...

Vanishing Point: Out of sight

Genealogy is an inconsistent science and growing a family tree quickly becomes an obsessive work of semi-fictional detective work. The urge to push further and further backward heading into our peasant laden past, hankering after the occasional sight of a king or...

Vanishing Point – Langemark

Langemark is I feel one of the most desolate corners of the Western front. As I mentioned in another piece on Vladslo there is something so desperately bleak and sad about German cemeteries. They don't lack in any of the respectfulness of the loss or the death or the...

Vanishing Point: Devil’s Wood

Oak is a feature of the English psyche, a fabled national wood if there is such a thing. It proliferates throughout our history from warships and traders building an Empire to the familiar furniture and ancient twisting house frames. The royal Oak subverted to shelter...

Vanishing Point: High Wood

The way to start these things is difficult sometimes 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 he was there in 1915 and wounded...

Vanishing Point: Fricourt New

The best and the worst of it all are hidden over a brow. You won't find the chattering crowds of the nexus points where death draws itself to a peak, this is not Thiepval or the Menin Gate. Nobody talks, no one sniggers, there is no rustle of frite wrapper when a hush...

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THROUGH GLASS

Through Glass: The lost villages of Stanta

There's been a few reports and exhibitions of work undertaken by photographers who have delved into the lost landscapes of the Stanford Training Area. There are tours, carefully marshalled around the activities that the army undertake in there as they have done since...

Through glass: North Norfolk holiday 1960s

Another small collection of found slides. These ones came via Martin Snelling (@LeftofNever on twitter), ex-Norwich lad, who runs View From This Side; a project which collects found transparencies and slides. I swapped them for a few slides of Albania, because... I...

Through Glass – Philip’s Glass: Trams

A few sample images from a batch of glass of Trams in Norwich I've got access to via a friend Phil. There are only three of these and they are in a bit of a state, looks like they weren't fixed terribly well and are quite badly smoked so I've had to pull them back a...

Through Glass: Lowestoft early 1960s

I recently went to visit Phil to take some stuff back. I'm terrible for not getting round to things and I'd had a pile of glass sitting on my desk at work for about three months, it's heavy, he's shut when I'm open and open when I'm shut and I just never got round to...

Through glass: Great Yarmouth

I'm always on the lookout 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 that act of identifying with a...

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...

Through glass: Norwich 1963 – The Phoenix slides part 1.

This is the first of a series of posts. These will be based around a collection of found photographs which were pointed out to me by a friend in possession of someone else I know who didn't really know what to do with them. These were picked up at a jumble sale; a...

Through Glass: Norwich 1900

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to have a box of glass slides come into my possession, here are a few of them, one day I'll get the whole lot scanned in and shared. But for now here are a selection of Norwich through the glass from about 1890 to 1920. I...

Found photos: The lost boys of Cromer

I go through people's leftovers, their old clothes, the maps of lines on their faces, sit in their seats and eat from their plates; strangers' stuff. They are people I can't know nor ever will in the vast majority of cases, nearly all of them are unreachable; dead,...

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. Norwich in the 1960s Part 3 St Helen's Church,...

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...

Through glass: 1960s norwich – part 4, streets

Difficult to subdivide these really, so the obvious one was to produce a post of 1960s Norwich street scenes or buildings which were shot. Some things are instantly recognisable, others less so. some things just haven't changed much beyond a coat of paint, others are...

Mystery: Albert and the returning troops 1916

A mystery photo. Last week Bethan Holdridge who works for the Museums service in Norwich invited me to have a look through her Great Grandfather Oliver Isaac Brown's collection of photos. He was a Suffolk man but lived in Great Yarmouth, a sapper in the Royal...

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...

Through glass: Norwich 1960s – part 2, Pubs.

There are a fair selection of pubs in Norwich in this batch, some still exist, some don't, all are interesting in one way or another. These are in no particular order and are pretty much straight out of the box. Norwich 1960s Part 2 The Plough Inn, Farmer's Avenue....

Rephotography: M&GN Ghosts

I decided to try out the 'Ghost' style of photo-merging after my friend Nick Stone started to share his wonderful 'Blitz ghost' images, inspired by the wonderful work of Sergey Larenkov. I didn't want to copy these projects, so I turned my attention to something that...

Ghosts: Sainte-Mère-Église

A couple of very quick ones, more or less on a whim. We went to Sainte-Mère-Église to have a wander around a bit of Second World War stuff, it's in close proximity to a place that apparently does amazing crepes, which was slightly annoyingly closed. But I knocked...

Lost city ghosts: Pitt Street

Pitt Street, now a scattering of industry and a quite a few nice trees. The entrance to Gildencroft, an alleged old jousting field now opened up to the corner of St Augustines and the churchyard, breathing some green into the traffic. Pitt Street once...

Rephotography: Ghosts of Reims

Re-Photography of Reims. Vincent Zénon Rigaud Auteur and photographer, born in Reims in 1981. I have practiced photography since childhood progressing on to digital photography. My first passion was studying history while at art school photography has became an...

Blitz Ghost – St Andrews

This is Harmer's Factory on St Andrews Broad Street in Norwich on the 18th March 1943 and the 2nd March 2012, almost seventy years., it's also a weird bit of land with not much on it, sort of an entrance to a car park of sorts. Harmer's was hit several times, firstly...

Blitz Ghosts: Oak Street & Sussex Street 1942

More scenes from the Norwich Blitz. Probably the morning of 28th April 1942. Tough ones. I spent far longer trying to work out where it was than normal, and there's story behind this scene that you will find below that brings the cost of it home. I found the spot...

Ghosts: A Dog’s Life, the Catton Liberator

This was the scene in Catton at the corner of Church Street and Spixworth Road on the 13th February 1945 and the corner of the same Roads on 22nd December 2011. The Liberator 'A Dog's Life' was one of two that crashed in Catton on the outskirts of Norwich, The other...

Ghosting: Norwich 1943

In Norwich in 1943 White stuff was an International, GAP was a Barclays bank, Buntings is Habitat, or was and Bullen's remains unchanged. The originals of these photos were taken by Lew Funk: his Son John is digitising his fabulous and fascinating collection which...

Ghosts: Swaffham history part 1

Plowright's Ironmongery Shop 1962. Part of the touring exhibition – Tradition and Innovation: The Story of Market Towns. From the press release: The exhibition will be touring to museums in Sheringham, Diss, Swaffham and Wymondham from November 2013 to July 2015,...

WW1 Aerial photos in colour: Water filled shell holes

I'm not sure where this is as I found it, it could be almost anywhere on the front at various times, a watery landscape where trenches are merely shell holes joined together, It could be Chateau Wood, it could be near Passchendaele or Hooge or somewhere on the front...

Blitz Ghost: St Bartholomew

One of the few real reminders of the blitz on Norwich that is easy to visit is the church of St Bartholomew, Heigham, Norwich, it's quite easy to find sitting just of Heigham Street and Waterworks Road. On the night of the 27th of April 1942 when the first of the big...

Great War: Zeppelin raids 2

A couple more ghost composites to commemorate the Zeppelin Raids on Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn on the 19th/20th of January 1915 both in Great Yarmouth in 1915, created exactly 100 years to the day. The soldiers are stood in the doorway of the Drill Hall near St...

Ghosts: Sheringham

Originally Part of the touring exhibition – Tradition and Innovation: The Story of Market Towns. From the press release: The exhibition will be touring to museums in Sheringham, Diss, Swaffham and Wymondham from November 2013 to July 2015, before making its way to...

Ghosts: Ypres in the Great War

This is an ongoing series of Ghosts that I tend to do on an as and when I'm in the right areas to do them and can find where they were taken. The difficulty being the extend of the damage to the front and the 100 years mean sometimes it's difficult to place anything...

Plunkett Ghost: Flood Levels 1961

Flood level gauges New Mills Yard. 27th August 1961 > 2012 Recording Norwich Flood levels 1570-1912. Boy's height 4 feet. The photographer's younger son, Jonathan, aged 6; he who has uploaded an enormous number of his father's photos to the triple-dub and...

Ghosting: Norwich’s first computer

The Treasurer's Department takes delivery of its Norwich's first computer at City Hall, in February 1957... and in 2013. I'm curious as to whether Westwood of Beccles is any relation to our Tim... Drop da bomb etc. Original photo courtesy Norfolk Record Office....

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...

Blitz in Colour: The British Gas Light Company, Dereham Road

Post-April 27th 1942, 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 made of sturdy...

Cinema Ghosts: The Central or Plaza

Right up in the middle of Great Yarmouth town centre is this. It stood where Poundland is, opposite the fish and chips and seats and seagulls and the kids and people eating lunch, it's quite a vibrant little bit of Great Yarmouth, I like it. I like chips too,...

Cinema ghosts: Great Yarmouth Regal & Theatre

More from the Norfolk at the Pictures rephotography series of Great Yarmouth. There two here showing the different incarnations of the Theatre and the Regal. The first one is the Theatre that gives the name to the now empty Theatre Street. It was demolished in 1933...

Ghosts: Norwich Cathedral 1919

Two ghosts from the Norfolk Regimental Museum which reopened last year in its new home in Norwich Castle. The original is from 1919, Part of Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service's fine collection. Photographic print (b/w); the memorial service and parade for the...

Cinema Ghosts: The Royal Aquarium Great Yarmouth.

This is the Hollywood, and it isn't it's also the Aquarium, a familiar site to nearly everyone who has ever been to Great Yarmouth, sitting as it does to the Northen End of the Town just before you head out through North Denes to Caister. They can see it blip in and...

Ghosts: Wymondham history part 1

Fairland Street 1900 and now. Part of the touring exhibition – Tradition and Innovation: The Story of Market Towns. From the press release: The exhibition will be touring to museums in Sheringham, Diss, Swaffham and Wymondham from November 2013 to July 2015, before...

Magdalen Street 2: St Botolph the traveller

Magdalen Street's hidden history: The lost churches Part 2, St Botolph. St Botolph or St Botulph or even St Botwulf was a church named after a saint that now only really lives on in an adapted street name. Ignominiously lost in a few street signs in the precincts...

Ghosts: Sainte-Mère-Église 2

A few more of Sainte Mère Église including the Rue Division Leclerc junction with Rue Général de Gaulleand the church; two Paratroopers deal with German snipers, both 1944 and not at the same time.

Norwich Castle Museum Ghost 1941 > 2012

Parachute troops, bare-headed and wearing 'jump jackets', in Norwich during exercises in Eastern Command, 23 June 1941. (Credit: IWM collection). Original Taken by Lt Puttnam, Official War Office photographer. Image of drizzle and murk, Nick Stone, Official...

Lost City Ghosts: St Andrews Hill

I went for a wander to do some work stuff and the light was wrong for what I was actually supposed to be doing so on the way back up St Andrew's Hill I did these two. Both are George Plunkett photos from 1936, showing the old buildings at the head of the hill where...

City Station – Norwich

A Blitz Ghost of the Portico of City Station, just at the bottom of Barn Road in Norwich being dismantled by one man and a hammer. The Station was bombed on the first night of the raids, Not built on entirely solid ground, it's basically marsh land round there and I...

Cinema Ghosts: Great Yarmouth

A recent addition to the series undertaken as part of project I've worked on with Cinema Plus at Cinema City, called Norfolk at the Pictures. This second set contains a series of images of cinemas in Great Yarmouth from the turn of the twentieth century up to 1960....

Blitz Ghosts – St Augustines

St Augustines School 1940, a posed shot for George Swain as the children enact an air raid drill, there are a few others in this series, showing twisted lines of children waiting to enter, one of the other ones lines up with the wall and some door and windows behind...

Forgotten Outposts: Stella Plage Atlantikwall

A beach in Northern France, Pas De Calais actually, just south of Le Touquet and Etaples. It's a beautiful beach, so I ignored it and took photos of this bunker. I can't find anything much out about it. Except it's a Vf style reinforced personnel bunker, obviously...

Lost in a landscape: Wretham Circles

There's a lightness about Breckland, A dryness and pallor to the soils that make it feel somehow different from the rest of Norfolk. It's in the earth, the thin sand with it's luggage of chalk and flint, the exhausted soldierly lines of Scots pine twisting away as...

Dead cities: Thorpe Abbotts

In February I was fortunate enough to get invited by Waveney Valley Community Archaeology Group with the permission of Lord Mann on a reconnaissance mission for a project they are doing on studying standing buildings on the site of Thorpe Abbotts airfield; A Second...

Forgotten outposts: The Bure line at Oxnead

You will, as you drive around north and east Norfolk, pass these all over the place. In fact you'll find them all over the county as you will tank blocks and mortar spigots, even the odd trench line still exists all still protecting us from a long dead, now...

Coasting: Winterton’s war

Yet more lumps of concrete, I doubt a the vast majority of people even give them a thought apart from trying not to scratch the car. Bit strange though, 13 ton blocks of concrete in a car park, and on the beach in one of those lovely little Norfolk corners....

Coasting: Guns of Mundesley

An odd little place is Munsley, somewhere inbetween Victoria and now you can sense a fading into much more of a backwater than was probably intended by the holiday destination builders. A pretty Victorian resort perched on high soft glacial sand cliffs, protected...

Dead cities: RAF Attlebridge

RAF Attlebridge ...the end of the South Eastern runway, Honingham Road, Western Longville. The most accessible publicly visible bit of the airfield left. The first station built in Norfolk for WW2 use. Originally RAF flying Blenheims and Bostons, it passed to USAAF...

Dead Cities: Deopham Green

RAF Deopham Green, latterly home to 452nd Bombardment Group (Heavy), becoming USAAF designation Station 142*. The group flew B-17 Flying Fortresses as part of the Eighth Air Force's strategic bombing campaign. This is a remnant of the North Runway and a runaway...

Lost in a Landscape: RAF Happisburgh

Everyone I mean *everyone* in North Norfolk, and the Eastern bit of North Norfolk, or East Norfolk as I like to call it when I'm a bit y'know, not from London or the home counties, knows Happisburgh. It's the most interesting bit of Norfolk Coast by a long way. This...

Dead cities: 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 from the coast,...

General Prints

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