LATEST FRAGMENTS

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,...

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...

Brighton, before the fall

When I was a kid and on into my teens I used to dream about the stars moving. I mean, I know they are actually moving, but then I could see them in 3D shifting and jittering, I could see the satellites and spacecraft in amongst them like an animated model...

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

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...

Hidden City: 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 particularly interesting one....

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...

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: 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...

Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

Lost in a Landscape: Scottow

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...

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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...

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PRINT SHOP

If you would like to buy a Limited or Open Edition Print of any of the Vanishing Points series you can click here to go to the shop to select or click through the images below.

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Through glass

Found slides, glass plates, photographs and archive material.

American holidays 1963 to 1970

SS Oriana from the 1960s

Cambridgeshire 1963/64

The Goodrum slides

Pleasure Beach

Through Glass: Norwich Skyline 1890s

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Black Dog Tales

The Black Dog of Sculthorpe Moor

Guest post by Nick Headland A couple of Black dog tales, neither experienced first hand which is more-or-less how Folklore works and how it evolves. So much so that Nick pointed out in his message that if he asked the other people involved now the story would change,...

The Mouldwarp King

Guest post: Martyn Hudson Like badgers in channels of hypocausts devoid of fire, The Mouldwarps scatter the cairns of our mothers, And the bogs hold our fathers pinned to wicker.[1] The mole is an ‘earth-thrower’ - a mouldywarp, molywarppe, moudiwarp,...

Wheal Vor – black dogs, gunpowder and goose feathers.

Guest post from Andrew MacDonald of Waveney Archaeology. Andrew lives in in South Norfolk Shuck territory, but is currently occupying his waking hours obsessing over tin mines in Cornwall. He does this in between trying to persuade people to stare at bumps in fields...

An introduction to Black Dog tales

An introduction to Mapping the grim and black dog tales. I grew up and live in Norfolk and have a family roots in the area going back nearly as far as the eye of history can see on paper and parchment, We have tilled these fields for centuries,...

Sheringham Graffiti

August has whirled by, hardly a breath between the blowing rain and the dry panic of the harvest. Combines throw their cones of dust over the fields pulling in the barley and wheat, sucking out what remains of the stored sun. We've been busy, fitting holidays in, our...

Black Dog tales: The Hound of St Austell

A guest post from Andrew Macdonald of Waveney Archaeology. Samuel Drew (1765-1833) was a self-taught man of letters; his special interest was metaphysics, which is perhaps why he is little known now. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker and gave the following account of...

Black Dog lore of the North York Moors

Guest post: Martyn Hudson, Newcastle University The North York Moors of North East Yorkshire are well known for their witch folklore and for lore around hybrid human and animal beings including the witch-hares of Danby Dale, Westerdale and Farndale, mermen and women...

Passing on Shuck

Tim Fox-Godden is friend who prints and illustrates, he also originates from the same area of Norfolk as me, he strolls down many of the same psychological byways and holloways as me and occasionally our paths cross. He has produced this rather lovely linocut as a...

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...

Tom Starling: Salthouse into Kelling

Wonderful piece of Norfolk dialect from a well-spoken North Norfolk chap relating his brief but nervy meeting with Shuck just outside Salthouse towards Kelling; one of the various 'two masters' routes that relate to the North Norfolk version of the tale based around a...

Black dog tales: From folklore to fiction, the landscapes of the Baskervilles

'There is a rumour that...' is a phrase that appears a lot in relation to the genesis of the spectral hound Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Black dog within. A variety of locations lay some claim to the hound, not least those used in the setting...

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...

Mapping the Grim

This was part of the original intent of the Public Archaeology project (for PA2015) and for me, because data is poetry and maps are fine prose. Due to the nature of my working life; the fact that I'm a bit of a butterfly/battering ram when it comes to how I...

Physical Graffiti

Guest post from Jess Macdonald From a very early age, I’ve always loved ghosts and ghouls, and long-legged-beasties and things that go bump in the night. Folklore, myths, the supernatural. I’ve never believed any of it, but it’s always exerted a hold on me. I’d plead...

The Discovery of the Lancashire Witches 1612

Guest post from Tim Hardy. Tim is a graphic designer, illustrator and history boy, he is also resident of the Pendle area. Follows a tale of Black dog as familiar, witches and the trial. Living in the Borough of Pendle, it’s not easy to escape the area’s...

Black Dogs and Cats in Suffolk

Guest post from Francis Young From Francis Young, regarding Heveningham Hall and Moreton Hall near Bury St. Edmonds. Heveningham is an area of previous alleged sightings in the 1920s which include the mention of a clanking chain, it is one of the archetypal...

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...

Mythogeography: The Halvergate Shuck

Guest post from Nigel Thorpe There's nothing quite as strange and good as a tale from the horses mouth, someone you know who has encountered, done, or experienced something. Nigel bumped into Shuck at the very start of the millennium. This story serves to show what a...

Fenland dogs

Black Shuck of the Fens Guest post: Matthew Champion I have a confession to make. I was born on the edge of the fens. A child of the bleak, flat and desolate waste that sits on Norfolk's western boundary, between 'the Isle' and the cold North Sea. I'm not a true fen...

The Black Dog of Bouley Bay

A guest post. This is actually an extract from Erren Michaels' new book on Jersey Legends which should be available very soon. It is available to pre-order here on the History Press website. On nights when the black dog roamed the hills of Bouley Bay people would lock...

Black dog tales: Bungay

"There were assembled at the same season, to hear divine service and common prayer in the parish church of Bongay, the people therabouts inhabiting. Immediately hereupon, there appeared in a most horrible similitude and likenesse to the congregation then and there...

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....

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...

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...

Lost city: St Augustines

I miss this, every time I buy a pork pie or a can of beans in the deep end of Spar I miss it. The cheap hot chocolate, the stinging eyes and the freezing water, those weird "no bombing, no petting..." signs. A post war development, not perhaps the most attractive...

Ghosting: Angel ghost

Originally produced for Len Holman as a leaving present. The photo is from the 1910s I believe. Angel Road school has quite an interesting history, it's changed a lot over the years, not physically, but in terms of what it is; certainly was a girls secondary for a...

Norwich in flames

Norwich in Flames: Here are a selection of George Swain's camera melting exploits. Originally photographed in Black and White. I colourised these, based on looking at modern colour photos of fires and then painting them in, very simply to be honest. They depict the...

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,...

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...

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...

Cinema Ghosts – The Odeon

Assembled for "Norfolk at the pictures" The Odeon stood on Botolph Street, long before it became the Odeon that glowered down in a 70s style over Magdalen Street, which is of course now a Hollywood cinema, with it's 'no clues there' logotype. This particular...

Blitz Ghosts: St Benedicts Church

Quite hidden away, a poor little thing. The tower is still there, preserved like like a thick flint chimney, or a Cloigtheach except no bells ring here, It reminds me of Messines in Flanders too. It's set in some grass just off St Benedicts Street, behind a new...

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...

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...

Blitz Ghosts: Danger UXB

I'm not sure where this is, I can't find any info out, but think it's possibly at Harford dump, which is where most of the defused stuff ended up, or it might be the depot in Ipswich. I'm on my way to getting some names for these chaps. Interesting to note that so far...

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,...

Ghosts: London blitz aerial maps

An iconic image from one German Heinkel III bomber showing another over Rotherhithe, the Surrey Commercial and West India Docks and Isle of Dogs to the right. Credit original: Southwark Library collection. 1940. CC Fair Use Wikipedia. Two German Dornier 17 bombers fly...

Great War ghost: Norwich tank versus taxi 1918

April 1918, Norwich gets a tank for a week, pictured here next to the Guildhall. This was part of the drive to buy more tanks, they did in fact make a huge amount of money to buy lots of tanks, over a million quid was raised nationally. This one was delivered by train...

Ghost Airfields of WW2: Part 1

I did these a few years ago, basically sticking aerial photos onto Google maps, I'd pretty much forgotten them until earlier. They seem worthy of a few posts. There are hundreds of these sites in East Anglia, and all, where accessible are worth a visit. If you want to...

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...

Trench Ghosts part 4

Langemark A few trench ghosts I did last week then got distracted and forgot about. One of Langemark and one of the Sugarloaf salient at Fromelles. The Langemark rephoto leaps out straight away. It's also familiar to anyone that's ever visited the German cemetery...

Blitz Ghosts: St Michael at Thorn

St Michael at Thorn, or it was, just behind the Archant building, sort of opposite or adjacent to the shops that survived the flame-grilling of Bonds in April 1942, this is 11 years before the bombs fell in 1931. So I'm standing roughly, within a foot or so of where...

Blitz Ghosts: St Giles

Upper St Giles Baedeker Raids again, not entirely sure which night to be honest 27th or 29th, I'm thinking 27th when Barn Road copped a load. What is interesting here though as much as anything is you can see how the new Cleveland Road sliced through the building that...

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.

Lost City Ghosts: St Augustines, The Rose Tavern

The Rose Tavern (previously also known as The Rose Inn), popular little pub on st Augustines, one of about six. It died in the 1980s after the Big Red Barrel war that spelled the end of so many pubs and ushered in an era of quite unpleasant fizzy rubbish beer that is...

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...

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...

Rephotography: Ghosting history

I should of course have done a piece on the Ghosts stuff properly ages ago, but time passes and what one minute seems to be the important and interesting bit of whatever you're doing suddenly isn't as much as it was three or four years ago. The recent conservation of...

WW1: Aerial Trench Ghosts Part 3 – Lens

Someone asked if I'd done any Loos aerials, I hadn't, it's not an area I'm hugely familiar with, it does tend to get forgotten in between all the noise about the Battle of the Somme and The Ypres Salient. There's plenty of front in between and some of it was very hard...

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...

Ghosts: Norwich Market & the Garnet Wolseley

I did these back in the olden days when sticking one photo on top of another was magical and cool. Then I forgot to publish them, I've just moved some backups about and lo, verrily these three popped up. The Garnet or the Sir Garnet or The Garnet Wolseley and the...

Vanishing Point: Rosebeke

A strange day. I've been working very loosely on an ongoing project called 'Vanishing Points' for a while. I'm a bit of a fan of VPs, lots of artists are as a way of leading the eye into compositions, focussing the viewers mind. Kubrick for...

Before the NHS…

I've microblogged before about this on Flickr using some family photos that belonged to my mother which you can see scattered about this page. The Health Service is quite important in our family, This was particularly true for my mother, who was involved from the...

9/11 – the years on

Guest post from Louisa Griffith-Jones. Sometimes you just stumble across a remarkable piece of writing. Louisa posted this earlier today. I read it standing at a bus-stop, a lump in my throat. She is a friend, someone I remember from gigs in the early 1980s at UEA...

It’s beginning to and back again

e went to London. We do this journey quite often, from the East it is a fairly routine trip, a day out; one of those the ever shortening distances that only just hold us all apart. We have offspring who have set up shop there in the expense and dull glitter, the piss...

Cambridge – persistence of memory

My mum grew up here. Her and therefore my ancestors were here for hundreds of years working as maids and cleaners, labourers, cartmen, and brickies, laying the railways, further back pulling the root veg through the surface of the peaty soils to the north or tending...

Gate guardians – Coltishall and Horsham.

This post is a short one, more of a response to this post and the photo which was found in a jumble sale in 2016 by Julie Chettleburgh. It contains a fabulous photo of a Spitfire on Farmer's Avenue (above) which caused a flurry of excitement as everyone either...

Approaching Nirvana

Heroes are strange beasts, as is memory. Nirvana never were particularly the former for me, but are very much part of the latter. Retrospectively 25 years on almost to the day it's still quite nice to know you were present at the stuttering birth of a new squalling...

Dear Dad…

I've resisted the urge to paint this incomplete picture for a while. But when I started writing this some months ago it would have been my dad's birthday. This got me thinking about him and about how I'm heading towards the age he was when my mum had me. And I've...

On the beach: Utah

We've just been away. It didn't take me very long to remember that I'm not very good at holidays. The vacancy of it all gets to me very quickly, I find it difficult to relax and conjure 'fun' up out of being somewhere just because it's somewhere else. We tend to end...

Norwich Baedeker blitz: The Lockwoods

The Lockwood family lived on Rosebery Road in Norwich, number 65 a very ordinary little terrace in a row of terraces nestling in the sea of shoe factory workers houses between St Clements Hill and Angel Road, not far from Angel Road School. In the Picture above we...

Mapping the Grim

Ghost Airfields of WW2: Part 4

It's raining and blowy, what better weather on a bank holiday for getting the scissors and glue out and sticking things together. So here's a few more; RAF Old Buckenham, RAF North Pickenham and RAF Wendling. It's all good fun this isn't it, beats getting muddy. Well...

Geomapping: Norfolk Deserted Villages

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

Ghost Airfields of WW2: Part 2

Second in the series, again a simple trick, sticking an aerial photo on a Google map, Maps eh, what's not to like. A selection here from the fair scatter across Norfolk, more to follow eventually. The Ghost above is from a series of photos which were pointed out to me...

Ghost Airfields of WW2: Part 1

V2 aerial ghosts

Vergeltungswaffe 2, The Retribution Weapon. A less than charming name for nasty things. The Germans were way ahead of us with rocket and jet technology, in fact they were way just ahead of us with most technology for most of the war. I remember marvelling at the...

WW1: Trench Ghosts Part 2

Part 2 in a series of an uncertain number of these things. There's no project like an open ended one... St Eloi 1915 St Eloi is just to the South East of Ypres on the Salient, not that far from Hellfire Corner, or Hellfire Roundabout as it is now. There are a number...

Trench Ghosts part 4

Ghost Airfields of WW2: Part 3

It's been a while. We drove around RAF Oulton today on our way away from the huge pile of humanity trying to take dogs, bikes, jetpacks and assorted noise with them to Blickling Hall. We went to Heydon, because a lot of people don't and we wanted to restfully drag the...

Ghosts: London blitz aerial maps

General Prints

I also offer miscellaneous prints for sale, sometimes at a discount and will occasionally print requests of images on the site to order. Please see below or visit the shop to see what is currently available.

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