Things to look at and read
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
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...
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
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...
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...
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
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...
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
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...
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. Temperatures are rising into those of a late summer day, yet it's...
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...
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...
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 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
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
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
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.
It suddenly struck me yesterday, what I'm trying to finish the unfinishable. The Great War may have ended in 1918, but it didn't, and so it goes, new layers of images, understanding and history being laid down with every word typed and shutter click. I'd set various...
Vanishing Point: Carnoy to Montauban
I'm not far from here. Sitting in a hotel room on a laptop, near a roundabout and Le McDonalds, watching a dubbed film which was bad enough in English in the first place. So I thought I'd start doing something apart from lazy hotel drinking. Carnoy is just to the...
Lost boys: Sid Northrop
I recently rediscovered this. It was something I'd put on Flickr. It is the tale of another family member and his last few days and hours in the Great War. We visited the panel he is remembered on at Tyne Cot a couple of years ago. He was my grandmother Jesse Parr's...
Vanishing Points series prints
Like what I do?
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 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...
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...
Blitz in Colour: The British Gas Light Company, Dereham Road
Post-April 27th 1942, Blitz in colour, this was the scene at the corner of Heigham Road and Dereham Road in Norwich during some kind of clear up work, probably to do with the gas supply. The whole crossroads here was badly damaged, the pub to the rear of the picture...
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...
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...
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...
Through glass
Found slides, glass plates, photographs and archive material.
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
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
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
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
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...
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,...
Persistence of memory
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
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
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...
Noisebox
This is primarily simply a list of all the records Noisebox in Norwich put out. Noisebox opened at the beginning of the 1990s. Set up by Pete Morgan, then fairly fresh in from Wales, and therefore known as 'Morgan the Noise'. Noisebox opened in the Old Fishmarket on...
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,...
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...
Graffiti Jam, Sovereign House, Anglia Square 2009
I'm a bit of a graffiti watcher, I like the stuff basically, it's that human mark-making thing. The 'remember me' trope. I've written about it a little bit before, arborglyphs at Blickling springs to mind. I've also watched a lot of developments with Medieval Graffiti...
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 piece about facing fear and the Great...
Cambridge – persistence of memory
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...
Sucking Eggs
My mum died over ten years ago at a ripe old age after period of massive emotional instability and half mad bought on by a large stroke. It was a hinterland for her and us – her children. A period which lasted 18 months from the onset – the invisible hole burning in...
Black Dog Tales
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
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Sheringham Graffiti
August has whirled by, hardly a breath between the blowing rain and the dry panic of the harvest. Combine harvesters 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...
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...
Georeferencing
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
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
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Ghost Airfields of WW2: Part 3
Ghost Airfields of WW2 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...
Buy stuff
New Forms – City
Photographs of Norwich North taken from forever to 2023
Vanishing Points
Western Front prints from 2012 to 2018, from the 2018 exhibition.
Colour
Landscapes, prints from various series and some one-offs by request.
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.
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.