LOST IN A LANDSCAPE
Coasting: Eccles beach – far away in time
Eccles beach. Not Echo Beach, but I like a nice inexpensive joke derived from a slightly odd eighties lyric now and again, you just watch me. There are a fair few Eccles in Britain the famous one is in Salford, where those crumbly buttery cakes with raisins in that...
Lost in a Landscape: Walsingham and the wolves
I have a book on Norfolk abbeys and friaries, a junk shop finds years ago, dating from the 1950s and is extraordinarily complete for a slim tome, Just enough background on everything to get you started without too much detail to confuse, small glossary to distinguish...
Lost in a Landscape – Blickling Arborglyphs
Dogs lead sometimes, our is beige, stinks, is opinionated and prefers woods to beaches, muck and leaf mould to sand and pebbles. There's more to sniff and mark an roll in in woods and fox shit beats dead gull hands down in the scent masking stakes for some...
Lost in a Landscape: Pleasure beach
An set of photos from 2009, taken during a phase of producing 'candids' or 'street' photos, it's an alleged art-form that involves trying to take photos of people in an interesting way without them realising and not getting your head kicked in. People dress it up in...
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: 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: Hainford All Saints
Not everything is as it seems, and as you drive towards Hoveton from Hainford there is one of those odd little places, this is All Saints Church, it's separated from the uncentred village as it stands today, but isn't the site of a deserted village, rather the church...
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 trip than somewhere like Attlebourough or Wymondham. The drive is less direct, you get more of...
Lost in a Landscape: St Theobald
In 1982 we were starting sixth form, it's an odd piece of territory that whole mid-teen bit of the timeline. One chunk of life you are used to, the uniformity and structure of school lessons ends, then there's a summer of free fall. Suddenly everything is properly...
Lost in a Landscape: Buckenham Carr
Heading west of the city two days before Christmas and it's all a bit of a bind, a glue of cars sticks the inner ring-road fast, the whole route backed up with shoppers, escapers, people leaving work early, the driving dead. The light is at its most tangential, the...
Lost in a landscape: Burying kings – Sutton Hoo
There is probably no finer Anglo-Saxon timescape in East Anglia, you are so directly in touch with a hauntingly beautiful landscape and can feel the significance of what you can see in front of you with only the most basic of knowledge. It is probably one of the most...
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
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
‘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....
VANISHING POINTS
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: 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. Somewhat hidden...
Vanishing point: Before endeavours fade
I'd been meaning to go to Holborn and take a photo of this chap for years. This is my grandfathers regimental memorial, he was in the 1st RF (of which I have already posted plenty), I collect these things for some reason I can't fathom. The memorial is a finely...
Vanishing Point: Thiepval
72,191 names. Rising up as it does above the trees on the Thiepval ridge on the Somme, it is by turns a beautiful, vast and horrifying edifice of brick and stone, coloured like blood and bone. A list, a huge frightening and sobering list. The number of names, the...
Vanishing Points: Tyne Cot
If and when you visit the Western Front, which a huge and growing number of people do partly because of the centenary and partly because you know, corner of a foreign field and all that family stuff, you are entering a piece of ground that is pretty much at the...
Shot at Dawn: John Abigail
John Abigail; A local lad, local to anyone in Norwich It's a longer story than I can write, and a sad tale too. Born in Thorpe Hamlet, they moved to Oak Street shortly before the outbreak of The Great War. John was one of eight children, the family were poor one with...
Vanishing Point: Flatiron Copse
There are parts of the Somme where you can and do suddenly feel remarkably isolated in the sun, bits around Serre in the tractor tyre marks and up on the swallowing heights of Redan Ridge with the wind and the larks. For me Mametz is one of the most curious of these,...
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...
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: The Leaning Madonna
She's not leaning anymore obviously, originally designed by sculptor Albert Roze and dubbed the 'Golden Virgin' - she stands holding aloft a golden baby Jesus on the very top of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebières in the middle of Albert. In fact she's very shiny...
Vanishing Point: The Somme still flows – Schwaben redoubt
I've been distracted enough not to put fingers to keyboard for the last week or so. Mainly because I had an upcoming trip to France, my first on my own due to some fairly uncontrolled sets of human circumstance and how time plays its stupid games. Travelling isn't an...
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: 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...
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: The Redoubt
There are areas of the Somme where you can really feel the past; where the landscape whilst modified hasn't been essentially changed. This is one of those places. What remains isn't difficult to spot and is easy to get too a walk down a grass clotted, tyre rutted path...
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: Mash Valley and Ovillers
The Somme is exceptionally beautiful. For me a landscape which feels like home. It is chalk downland, when you get up onto the solitary heights of the Redan Ridge or the plateau where Thiepval sits it feels so similar to parts to the southern downlands. Below lies the...
Vanishing Point: Essex Farm, The Eve brothers
I'm fortunate, I get to go to Ypres and the Somme and indeed various other bits of the Western Front fairly often, I do it mostly for my own vicarious pleasure/misery or whatever you find you want to call it. If I face facts it is I suppose a strange thing to want to...
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: 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...
Vanishing Point: Stumbling through Ploegsteert
I'm a virtual veteran of two world wars, one in particular; The Great War, the one to end all thingummys... as an anomalous title for a war as there could possibly be. That aside I do a lot of, or as much as I can afford and fit into life without annoying my very...
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: Sint Juliaan – Under a green sea
The Brooding soldier; Sint Juliaan or St Julian or Vancouver Corner, take your pick, Flemish, English or Canadian. It sits just to the North East of Ypres on the way to Langemark/Poellcappelle and not far from Passchendaele It is primarily a Canadian memorial. I can...
The long walk
Not the most thrilling set of photographs, but the one above shows how a field with some lumps in it, tells a story or doesn't. And of course it also tells how history is there, I'm just the princess who knows where that particular pea is under this particular...
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 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 points: The Sad Angel of Kemmel
The French Memorial at Kemmel. She sits next to a steep road in a cup in the trees, standing a fair way up the slopes of the mount on a clutch burning incline. Known as Mont Kemmel, Mount Kemmel or Kemmelburg depending on your nationality, all of them held it a one...
Vanishing points: Mining the front – Messines 1917
The anniversary of the massive mining attack passed at 3.10am on Saturday the seventh of June, ninety-seven years since. This year rather overshadowed by the 70th anniversary of D-Day on the sixth of June and justly so. But this is one of those events that in a...
Vanishing Point: The Ridge
It's quite an apposite moment, the ridge being what it is, a symbol of so much thrashing about in the earth trying to gain a foothold, somewhere that looms large in Canada's psyche and it's nearly Canada Day, a day that symbolises so much about the gradual joining of...
PRINT SHOP
The Vanishing Points Exhibition ran at St Peter Hungate in Norwich from the 11th of November 2018.
Anyone who wishes to buy a Limited Edition or Standard Print can click here and go to the shop to select.
Delivery in the UK is free, please get in touch if you live outside the UK and would like to buy one.
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: 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 – 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: 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....
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...
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: 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 fixed...
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 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 suspect...
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 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: 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: 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: 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: 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...
REPHOTOGRAPHY
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...
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...
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...
WW1: Aerial Trench Ghosts Part 1
I did one of these to explain something to someone, then tweeted it and it all went a bit nuts, so it makes sense to put some of them together into posts on here rather than having them scattered to the 00000100 corners of the digital world. Schwaben Redoubt Early...
Ghosts of D-Day
I rather missed the landing craft with these, I mucked about setting up the post last week in anticipation of the 70th Anniversary and then ran out of time to do it. But here they are in the second wave, lost behind the Tsunami of other Ghosts of D-Day that suddenly...
Ghosts: Eastern Front
Earlier this year Paul Reed the military historian was on one of his trips, this one to Germany, the East Front, bits of Leipzig and Berlin were taken in. He started to take photos and post them, doing a remarkable job of lining them up with the originals. So, I sat...
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...
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...
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...
Lost City Ghosts: The Forum and St Peter’s Street.
Peter Mancroft & Forum - White Swan Yard Ghost 1960 > 2013, Part of a series I start and stop doing as the desire takes me as you do. I might do some more soon just for the hell of it. The site has seen a fair bit of turmult over the last 60 years, what with...
Blitz Ghost: Alexandra Road and Helena Road
Alexandra Road, another Norwich Blitz Ghost. A 250kg bomb took out about 4 properties, quite a precise slice, which is still very evident if you look at the row today the missing block was replaced with a more modern variant of the generic terrace, a pattern you can...
Colourisation: Alois Gilgenbach
An interesting little job/favour for Rob Schäfer of gottmituns.net/, this is his Great Uncle Alois Gilgenbach, retouched and colourised. I've not attempted a Wehrmacht soldier before, but at the end of the day the only real difference was feld grau instead of khaki,...
Ghosts: Hawthorn Ridge the Somme
I feel like a bit of a slacker, I'm tired, having gallivanted through The Somme for most of three days, I'll leave you with this; a starter for ten. The photo is a ghost of one of the Somme mines that were set of at precisely and critically 7.30 (roughly-ish) in the...
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...
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...
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: 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,...
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 it...
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...
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...
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...
Here are the young men
I've been rescuing these boys from Junk shops for years, those 50p unknowns, the Great Uncles who maybe died and had no children, they become orphaned from their families, so I've ended up with an old biscuit tin full of these lads. Mostly Brits, but a few Aussies and...
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...
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...
Cinema Ghosts: The Empire Great Yarmouth
The Empire, a rather grand building standing above anything else at the more southern End of Marine Parade. It is a rather splendid Pigeon home, and although bits of fascia have been removed is still a rather attractive old building, the inside is supposed to be...
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...
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...
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. Love...
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 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...
FORGOTTEN OUTPOSTS
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...
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 you...
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,...
Dead cities: RAF Swannington
RAF Swannington, known locally as RAF Haveringland, either way it's a little Gem, I spent the best part of a blisteringly hot afternoon messing around on the edges of an all but invisible Second World War airfield. It's just there, lost in the landscape, the fields...
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. Winterton,...
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 as...
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 summer...
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...
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: 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...