Things to look at and read

The forgotten chapel – William of Norwich

Ring-roads, go round and past. Nature of the beast I suppose, circling. Norwich is blessed with ever-increasing circles; from the old castle ditches and the fee to the city wall and the inner link roads, out to the proper ring-road now forming into another ripple of...

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: Horsey

Horsey is a curious area, it's always felt like slightly dead ground to me, for the uninitiated it is just to the North of Winterton and South of Waxham, it has it's own Broad a large flat expanse of water edged by windpumps, dunes and intermittent seals. One of my...

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 not sure...

Hidden history: Traces – Boulevard Saint-Michel, Paris

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

Vanishing Point: Bernafay Wood

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...

On Landscape interview – Nick Stone

An interview by Michéla Griffith, reproduced with kind permission of On Landscape magazine, April 2019. For this issue, we have something a little different. Nick Stone describes his website, Invisible Works, as a series of fragmentary blogs and pieces about history,...

Coasting: Happisburgh – Where the wild thing were…

Happisburgh, a curious place to find yourself, a favourite place of mine – the quality of the light on an eastern coast is strange, the ever-changing riven landscape, the beating sea. It sits 20 miles to the East of Norwich, below the stretch of coast where the cliffs...

Through glass: Victorian Great Yarmouth

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

Magdalen Street 3: St Margaret – beating the demons

Magdalen Street's  hidden history: The lost churches Part 3, St Margaret. About thirty years ago, there was a little club in Magdalen Street; a brilliant grubby little hand-me-down from the age of jazz, blues and skiffle. It sat towards the end of Magdalen Street...

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...

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Lost in a landscape

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

North City

Photographs of North Norwich taken from forever to 2023

Colour

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

Vanishing Points

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

Great Yarmouth

Photos from various series between 2000 and 2021.

Coasting

Photography from along the coast of East Anglia

Posters

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

Limited Editions

Special edition numbered/signed Giclée prints – studio printed

Flatland

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

Lost in a Landscape

and other places…

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.

Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

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...

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Lost in a Landscape: Scottow

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...

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Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless

Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless

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...

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Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood

Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood

There is a darkness in woodland, hiding in the shade of the green canopy, something that retracts in the sunlight in the corner of your vision, beyond the growing and shrinking of the shadows, the greening, then yellowing, then bareness, with each revolution of the...

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Lost in a Landscape: Trunch

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...

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Lost in a Landscape: Rich pickings – Swafield

Lost in a Landscape: Rich pickings – Swafield

Swafield and Bradfield ‘Fruit picking’ and ‘Pick your own’, are something commonly seen on hand painted signs still wedged in hedges and gateways across rural East Anglia and the Fens, it was and is part of a year long routine in Norfolk, especially with summer...

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Lost in a landscape: Little Witchingham

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...

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Lost in a Landscape – Lyng Easthaugh

Lost in a Landscape – Lyng Easthaugh

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...

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Last breath: Rosary Cemetery

Last breath: Rosary Cemetery

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

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Lost in a Landscape – Blickling Arborglyphs

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...

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Coasting – Bacton

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...

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Vanishing Points

The Great War series

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

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

Vanishing Point: Bernafay Wood

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...

Vanishing point: Courcelette

Vanishing point: Courcelette

I've been fortunate at times out on the front, walking the levelled trenches, across the flattened shell holes and in the regrown woods. You meet people, some you know via the curious enmeshed world of social media, shared interests in a shared space eventually made...

Vanishing point: Guillemont, Trones and Jünger’s Lane.

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

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

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 series 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.

Blitz ghosts, bomb maps and more…

Ten years ago I did a thing, the echo is still rattling about in my head, occasionally it slides noisily back into my consciousness so I add to it, it’s mostly here.

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...

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Baedeker Blitz Norwich – deaths

Baedeker Blitz Norwich – deaths

I've intended to publish this every year since about 2011, refining it slowly. A year or so ago I tweeted all of these names, these people, because every year I always try to do something or other perhaps in an oddly selfish way, in some ways to remember them all just...

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Blitz in Colour: Dereham Road Baptist Church 1942

Blitz in Colour: Dereham Road Baptist Church 1942

Dereham Road Baptist Church opened in 1904. Closed temporarily in 1942 during the Baedeker Raids. Sources point at this being a result of the first raid on the Monday night; the 27th of April; this would fit the pattern of most of the bombing being of the north and...

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Blitz in Colour: Curls Store 30th April 1942

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...

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Blitz Ghosts: Church of St Julian of Norwich

Blitz Ghosts: Church of St Julian of Norwich

One of the best known Blitz victims in Norwich, because of the famed Julian of Norwich. It was hit head on by a 250kg High Explosive bomb and all but obliterated as you can see. Beautifully rebuilt, and a fabulous little church, a nice calm space that feels more like...

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Through glass

Found slides, glass plates, photographs and archive material.

American holidays 1963 to 1970

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, Cincinnati,...

SS Oriana from the 1960s

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 not sure...

Cambridgeshire 1963/64

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 anyway, this one...

The Goodrum slides – found photos

The Goodrum slides – found photos

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 Branson's...

Pleasure Beach – Great Yarmouth 2009

Pleasure Beach – Great Yarmouth 2009

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 a drive...

Through Glass: Norwich Skyline 1890s

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...

Black Dog Tales

The Mouldwarp King

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, mouldwarp, moldwarp. The collision between...

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,...

Black dog tales: Bungay’s Black Shuck

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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, certainly as far as the...

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 approach...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Black dog tales: From folklore to fiction, Cromer and 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 or Black Shuck loitering within. A variety of locations lay some claim to the hound, not least...

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...

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...

Persistence of memory

Trench Fever

I thought it was about time I did a bit of quantifying, I've done a something in a previous piece here, which scratches at the back of a story but only tells the penultimate episode of it not the rest, there's other bits clanging and banging about on the internet that...

The workhorse and the charger

I lived in North Walsham as a kid. RAF Coltishall was only about 6 miles away. We all grew up with the English Electric Lightning; the cold-war emblems, a sliver flash glossily belting past on high, occasionally breaking the sound barrier with that window-rattling,...

Babylon’s Burning

I’m reasonably open about the fact that I have a mental health condition, I suffer from anxiety. I talk about it occasionally on social media, friends know, but I haven’t ever made any kind of thing about it apart from writing a thinly veiled piece about facing fear...

It’s beginning to and back again

We 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...

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 right there...

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...

Collapsing new buildings: Sheffield

I used to go to Sheffield a fair bit, less so now as one of the reasons we went as often as we did was one of my children lived there and she now lives in Greece, via Slovakia and Vietnam, she is one of the estimated 2 million Britons living in Europe that handily get...

Norwich Baedeker blitz: The Lockwoods

The Lockwood family lived at number 65 Rosebery Road in Norwich, a very ordinary little house 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 have...

On Utah Beach

We'd 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 tended to end...

What’s THIS for…! Killing Joke in Norwich

You might recognise this scene for two reasons; Firstly you live in Norwich and have walked down either Duke Street or Oak Street or have sauntered down this chopped off continuation of Colegate beside St Miles Church with it's lovely flushwork and tracery. Secondly,...

REPHOTOGRAPHY

Ghosts: R101 & Norwich Castle

There's a thing on the telly tonight about Zeppelins*, this isn't one, but it's the best of got it's the R101 over Norwich in 1929. the sound you can here is me jumping on a bandwagon and promptly falling off and hurting myself. The photo is from Norfolk Record...

Ghosting Hillfields

This Gallery form a collection that was part of a recent commission for Imagine Hillfields part of a larger project called Imagine. The project was and is about how we relate to our environment and how we imagine our present and future, connecting communities through...

Ghosts: Sheringham

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

Ghosts of D-Day – Sword Beach

Sword Beach 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...

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 Tim... 'Drop da bomb' etc. Original photo courtesy Norfolk Record Office. Love...

Crome’s Norwich

As part of the Crome's Norwich exhibition at Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell I've wandered around a lot of the areas where John Crome is known to have frequented over 200 years ago. Obviously in the process of this piece of psychogeography I've become more familiar...

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 out...

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: 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...

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: 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...

A Dornier in a car park.

Not something you see every day. This is the Norwich Dornier, a Do 17z Number U5 EA. The same one featured in various photos of Eaton Park in Norwich, Sitting there like a giant Airfix kit being winched onto a flat back. A German Dornier Do17z in bits in the car park...

Blitz Ghosts: Aylsham Road

Aylsham Road, Norwich, April 1942 and nearly now, one of my first Norwich Ghosts. There are two pictures of the area. Both I believe taken by George Swain. The top Blitz Ghost is the first one I ever did, and the bottom one is the last. A 500kg landed here, it blew...

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,...

Blitz Ghosts – St Augustines School, Norwich

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...

Norwich Blitz Ghosts: St Giles

Upper St Giles Another Norwich Blitz ghosts, 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...

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...

Time warps Alkmaar

A Guest post from Mark Alphenaar on the Regional Archive at Alkmaar. At the Regional Archive Alkmaar in The Netherlands we think that history should be easily accessible to all people, young and old no matter their background. We think we have found a way to do just...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

Great War: Zeppelin raids

A couple of ghost composites to commemorate the Zeppelin Raids on Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn on the 20th of January 1915 for my opening 'ghosting' escapade of 2015. Above is St Peters Villa on St Peter's Plain and below is damage to Drake's Buildings, both in...

Cinema ghosts: Great Yarmouth Cinemas Regal & Theatre

Great Yarmouth Cinemas 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...

Blitz Ghosts: Oak Street & Sussex Street, Norwich, 1942

Oak Street & Sussex Street, Norwich, 1942. More scenes from the Norwich Blitz. Probably the morning of 28th April. 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...

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...

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...

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...

Lost City Ghosts: Oak Street & St Martins

106 to 114 Oak Street, when George Plunkett pounded the streets in 1936 snapping away at the other end of the time tunnel, these rather lovely Tudor houses were still there, then a period of massive vandalism occurred during which Norwich reshaped itself, partly with...

Blitz Ghosts: St Michael at Thorn, Norwich

St Michael at Thorn, Norwich. Or it was. It stood 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...

Georeferencing

V2 aerial ghosts

Vergeltungswaffe 2 or V2, 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...

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...

Aerial ghosts: Messines updated

I had a very interesting email today from Gil Bossuyt of frontaaltours.com which has prompted this post. Gil has been looking at the image I originally colourised in this piece. It goes thus: "I went searching on trench maps to recognize some road structures, and...

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 approach...

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...

Airfields in Norfolk: Mapped

Several years ago, I did this entirely to satisfy my own wanderings, it is publicly visible on Google already, but it made sense to post it on the website to so it's more findable. It is worth noting that a lot of these sites are on private farmland or have morphed...

Norwich: “Brightest shining of the city” – part 1

Viking and Anglo-Saxon Norwich We live here. It is easy to forget where Norwich comes from, we take our surroundings for granted; a city that has grown from virtually nothing over the last 1200 years. A scattering of people living on gravel terraces above a bend in a...

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...

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...

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...