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

Pleasure Beach – Great Yarmouth 2009

I've had a few minor-league unpleasant 'Oh FFS' things happen lately. The most recent was a hard-drive suddenly making a horrible keening noise and then refusing to mount. Two days of trying different software to get it working again and bingo I had a drive that...

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...

Lost in a landscape: Bacton Wood

Feet facing the sun – Bacton Wood When I was a child we had a dog called Sally. She was what the local vet referred to as a Daisy Dog, a mixture of this and that, pretty well mannered and a bit tatty, a cross breed of indeterminable heritage with a long black coat...

Waterland: Strumpshaw fen

There is something mysterious and magical about the Broads. I've idled a fair while in the past sitting in a boat, the idiot at the other end of the line from the maggot or more correctly a dead lamprey or smelt when I used to fish. It's basically trying desperately...

Lost in a Landscape: Walsingham and the wolves

I have amongst my detritus a book on Norfolk abbeys and friaries, it's a junk shop find from years ago. It dates from the 1950s and is extraordinarily complete for a slim tome, just enough background on everything to get you started without too much confusing detail,...

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...

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...

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...

Back in the HMSO

The now redundant HMSO building, Sovereign House, brutalist Norfolk at it's finest in Anglia Square Norwich North. Growing from the remains of St George Street to the rear of Anglia Square and the first floor deck of what would have been a two storey 'Mall' or...

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...

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...

RAF Coltishall gate guardians

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...

Lost in a landscape: Mannington

Sunday seemed like it was the last blast of summer weather, that final sigh of heat and sun and as it goes some drifting was the perfect way to absorb those last few rays before the decent into the washes of winter Atlantic lows bear down across us. So we did 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...

Coasting – Bacton

Bacton; a place name to conjure with if you know North East Norfolk's emptier fringe. A confusing piece of coast where as you move north of Happisburgh; the cliff drops and as it swings further round and there is a vale where Walcott sits. A series of tiny villages...

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...

Coasting: Sidestrand – the moving edge

Sidestrand - the moving edge There are a few places where you can really see the dynamism of the erosion of the soft coastline. It is obvious along nearly the whole length of Norfolk and well into Suffolk, our soft glacial memory is easily eroded. Shifts can be seen...

Hidden history: Doors of Perception

Sometimes the interesting things are hidden in plain sight and it's remarkably easy to just overlook stuff like bits of public art because you see them all the time, these are just such a thing. I am a lover of city hall, I like the shape it makes in the sky, it's a...

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: North Walsham – The revolt 1381

I found myself with a few free moments on Sunday afternoon and after some deliberating with tea and fags decided the best option was to tick something off my lists of things I wanted to go and see and do. So, I ended up in North Walsham, a market town I'd lived in for...

Lost in a Landscape: Blicking Mausoleum

Blickling is a rather lovely estate near Aylsham, open to the public, with a  few good trackways and walks across it to amble along. It also contains a couple of interesting buildings aside from the more obvious hall itself and the large Carp filled lake, so it's easy...

Magdalen Street: Part 1 – Introduction

Norwich-over-the-water is a strange place. Magdalen Street or Fybriggate as it was originally called and its immediate environs sometimes seem divorced from the city and historically were separated from the rest of the Central norwich by a relatively thin stretch of...

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...

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...

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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